Yet while the organization might be English, the operatives were Russians. The unsurpassed malachite pillars combine in the grand altar-screen with columns of lapis-lazuli: the latter are said to have cost per pair L12,000 sterling. I need scarcely observe that this parade of precious metals partakes more of barbaric magnificence than of artistic taste; indeed these columns of malachite and lapis-lazuli, which to the eye present themselves as solid and honest, have been built up as incrustations on hollow cast-iron tubes. Thus hollow are the most precious arts of Russia. Justice, however, demands that I should speak hereafter in fair appreciation of the interiors of Russian churches, whereof the Cathedral of St. Isaac is among the chief. Nevertheless, material rather than mind, money rather than art, is the governing power; malachite, lapis-lazuli, gold, and other precious substances are heaped together profusely, yet no architect in Europe of the slightest intellectual pretensions, would care to look a second time at the constructive or decorative conceptions which the churches of St. Petersburg display. St. Isaac's in fact is miraculous only in its monoliths. I could scarcely believe my eyes when first I stood beneath the stately porticos and looked from top to bottom of the very many columns, seven feet in diameter and sixty feet high, all polished granite monoliths from Finland. Already I had made the assertion that there was nothing new in St. Petersburg when these granite monoliths at once compelled a recantation.