The Cathedral of St. Isaac is the most costly and pretentious of Russian churches. The noble edifice has the advantage of a commanding situation; not, it is true, as to elevation--for that is impossible in a city set throughout on a dead level--but the surface area in its wide sweeping circuit at all events contrasts strikingly with that cribbed and cabined church-yard of St. Paul's in London, which the Englishman may have just left behind him. Yet St. Isaac's can scarcely venture on comparison with St. Paul's, though the style of the two buildings is similar. The great Cathedral of St. Petersburg has, however, the advantage of that concentration which belongs to the Greek as distinguished from the Latin Cross, a distinction which has always been to the disadvantage of St. Peter's in Rome. A cross of four equal arms, with columned porticos mounted nobly on steps at the four extremities, the whole composition crowned by central and surrounding cupolas, is assuredly an imposing conception, of which the French artist M. Montferrand has known how to make the most. I may here, by way of parenthesis, remark that the two works which do most honour to St. Petersburg, the Cathedral of St. Isaac and the adjacent equestrian statue of Peter the Great, are severally due not to Russian but to French artists. This is one example among many of the foreign origin of the arts in Russia. But at all events let it be admitted that the materials used, as well as the ideas often brought to bear, are local or national. For example, the grandest of all architectural conceptions, the idea of a dome, is here glorified in true Russian or Oriental manner, not so much by magnitude of proportion as by decorative splendour, heightened to the utmost by a surface of burnished gold. Then the four porticos which terminate each end of the Greek cross with stately columns and entablatures of granite from Finland, albeit in design mere commonplace complications, are wholly national in the material used. I do not now stop to mention the large and bold reliefs in bronze, which though French in design were, I believe, cast in St. Petersburg: indeed here, as in Munich, the government makes that liberal provision which only governments can make, for noble but unremunerative art. The great dome is said to be sustained by iron; indeed the science of construction brought to bear is great, yet again it must be acknowledged that whether the material be iron, bronze, or stone, the art, the skill, and even the commercial capital, are not Russian but foreign, and often English. Russian workmen, however, are employed as mechanics or machines, partly because in copyism and mechanism Russian artisans cannot throughout Europe be surpassed. When I got to St. Petersburg I could scarcely believe the statement to be true that the "English Magazine" and not any Russian factory had executed the eight stupendous malachite pillars within the church, weighing about 34,000 pounds and costing L2,500 sterling.