Travels in Germany and Russi

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. HANOVER HOTEL?TRAVELLERS?TURKISH PASHA OPERA ? SOCIETY?HANOVERIAN ARMY THE KING CONSTITUTIONAL QUESTION OF HANOVER REVENUE OF HANOVER. In ten hours we travelled from Bremen to Hanover on a good road, over a perfectly flat country. As we approached the capital, the scenery improved: we thought the environs beautiful from their contrast with the city, which is not enticing. Whatever it might have appeared to us, however, we had no reason to complain personally, for the British hotel in the square is one of the best in Europe, and its master, Mr. Wessel, one of the most obliging and best informed of landlords. He had followed various trades by sea and by land since he left his native place, Bremen, ?had been captain of a merchantman and harbour-master at St. Thomas's?and could talk well of things and men. He was given to chemico-medical research: he had found, or supposed he had found, specifics for glanders, hydrophobia, and plague. I took his recipe for the latter disorder to Constantinople, but had not the fortune to find a subject in my last visit to the eastern capital on whom to try the experiment. I met at the table d' hote the former ' superior of mine host at St. Thomas's, General Scholten, governor of the Danish West India islands. The General had just been to see Queen Victoria's coronation, and appeared to have been as much struck with the high charges at his hotel as at the ceremonial. Every thing was on a grand scale in London, he thought. General Scholten is well and honourably known as the instrument of emancipating the negroes in the Danish islands; but, as he observed to me, his own success could not be taken as an estimate of the facility of the measure generally, because, in addition to the small number of slaves in the Danish isles, the gove...