The Rigi, which confronts Pilatus across the lake in such startling dissimilarity, is perhaps the most popular hill in Europe, and is certainly in a sense the most vulgar. It is bad enough that a hill should be desecrated by a single mountain railway: it is intolerable that it should be degraded by three! How many people ascend to the Rigi Kulm on a day of tolerable weather in August from either Vitznau or Arth-Goldau one would hardly dare to guess; how many are housed at night in one or other of the monster hotels--at Rigi Kulm, at Rigi Kaltbad, at Rigi Staffel, at Rigi Scheidegg--that oppress and burden its weary summits is a matter not to be dwelt on. This is not the place to attempt a dissertation on the _quæstio vexata_ of mountain railways. To the writer (who is prejudiced) the thing seems axiomatic: all that goes to make up mountain grandeur, all that is of the spirit, "Of eye and ear--both what they half create, And what perceive"-- all that renders a mountain a mountain, as opposed to a mere elevated mass of matter-- "Of stratified rock Inclined at an angle of xty degrees"-- is gone in a moment when you thus strip a hill of its proper attributes--of its mystery, of its remoteness, of its difficulty of access; and there remains nothing save bulk, which you get in the Great Pyramid; and prospect, which you get from the Eiffel Tower; and a clever bit of engineering (diabolically clever), which is just as well got in the Great Wheel at Kensington. Yet frankly it must be confessed that if something had to be sacrificed to gratify the sensation-mongers, and the lazy, and the impotent, the Rigi might best be immolated. Just this one hill, perhaps, might be spared: but was it necessary to bind to the horns of the altar every other hill of medium size in Switzerland--the Niesen, and the Brienzer, Rothhorn, and the Schynige Platte, and the Beatenberg; to say nothing, on the shores of Lake Lucerne itself, in addition to the Rigi, of the Burgenstock, and Pilatus, and the Stanserhorn; and elsewhere in Switzerland of the deeper crime of the Jungfrau, and in Savoy of the crowning infamy of Mont Blanc?