TAX UPON TRAVELLERS.
TO THE EDITOR OF THE SPECTATOR.
Sia—Yon may think use treating what is meant as a joke too gravely, but I cannot allow the recommendation of your "Old Subscriber" to pass without remark.
Remember your own observation when the question of surcharges at inns was first started—that in this country we pay for obsequiousness. The towns on the Rhine are the great mill-horse round of the ennuyd English travellers, who have been spoiled by this obsequiousness, and to whom every arrangement dif- fering from what they have been accustomed to is uncomfortable and regarded as a mark of barbarism. I am no stranger to such polite entries in the books kept at inns on the Continent for receiving the remarks of guests, as are quoted by your correspondent ; and at least in one half of the instances ob- served, 1 have found them the unjust and splenetic effusions of the classes alluded to. When the landlord and traveller have a difference, the latter is not always in the right ; and the consiousness alluded to by your cor- respondent, that mine host and his family do not understand English, has often tempted low-minded tourists (for such there are) to injure the inn- keeper by unfounded slander. Your correspondent is aware, that to pub- lish such statements would be libellous: to whisper attacks which the law would punish, is malignant and cowardly as well as libellous. No person with the spirit of a gentleman could have recourse to such dirty practices. I have bad a good deal to do with innkeepers in my day—always as a traveller—and 1 have found them on the average quite as civil and honest as the travel- lers who make such a rout about them, and entitled to protection against all
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