At a public-house you expect public-house manners, and nothing better
will meet you at most of the so-called inns or hotels. It surprises me
to think in how few instances I have found even the pretence of civility.
As a rule, the landlord and landlady are either contemptuously superior
or boorishly familiar; the waiters and chambermaids do their work with an
indifference which only softens to a condescending interest at the moment
of your departure, when, if the tip be thought insufficient, a sneer or a
muttered insult speeds you on your way. One inn I remember, where,
having to go in and out two or three times in a morning, I always found
the front door blocked by the portly forms of two women, the landlady and
the barmaid, who stood there chatting and surveying the street. Coming
from within the house, I had to call out a request for passage; it was
granted with all deliberation, and with not a syllable of apology. This
was the best "hotel" in a Sussex market town.

And the food. Here, beyond doubt, there is grave degeneracy. It is
impossible to suppose that the old travellers by coach were contented
with entertainment such as one gets nowadays at the table of a country
hotel. The cooking is wont to be wretched; the quality of the meat and
vegetables worse than mediocre. What! Shall one ask in vain at an
English inn for an honest chop or steak? Again and again has my appetite
been frustrated with an offer of mere sinew and scrag. At a hotel where
the charge for lunch was five shillings, I have been sickened with pulpy
potatoes and stringy cabbage. The very joint--ribs or sirloin, leg or
shoulder--is commonly a poor, underfed, sapless thing, scorched in an
oven; and as for the round of beef, it has as good as
disappeared--probably because it asks too much skill in the salting. Then
again one's breakfast bacon; what intolerable stuff, smelling of
saltpetre, has been set before me when I paid the price of the best