Here the reader’s desk, which is at some distance from the pulpit, is an enclosure of very fine brass rails gilt, in which is a gilt brass pillar supporting an eagle of brass gilt, which holds the book on his back and expanded wings. The altar piece is adorned with four noble fluted pilasters painted and veined with gold in imitation of lapis lazuli, and their capitals are double gilt. In the intercolumniations are twenty-one pannels of figured crimson velvet, and above them six windows, in two series. The floor of the choir, and indeed of the whole church, is paved with marble: but within the rails of the altar with porphyry, polished and laid in several geometrical figures. But to be more particular: as the disposition of the vaultings within is an essential beauty, without which many other ornaments would lose their effect, so the architect was particularly careful in this respect. “The Romans,” says the author of the _Parentalia_, “used hemispherical vaultings, and Sir Christopher chose those as being demonstrably lighter than the diagonal cross vaults: so the whole vault of St. Paul’s consists of twenty-four cupolas cut off semicircular, with segments to join to the great arches one way, and which are cut across the other, with eliptical cylinders to let in the upper lights of the nave; but in the isles the lesser cupolas are both ways cut in semicircular sections, and altogether make a graceful geometrical form, distinguished with circular wreaths which is the horizontal section of the cupola; for the hemisphere may be cut all manner of ways into circular sections; and the arches and wreaths being of stone carved, the spandrels between are of sound brick, invested with stucco of cockle-shell lime, which becomes as hard as Portland stone; and which having large planes between the stone ribs, are capable of the farther ornaments of painting, if required.