IF you are weary reading of royal palaces, you will be sorry to be invited to the one more gorgeously adorned and illustrated than any other which you and I have entered in company. You have often heard of, and perhaps have seen, some specimens of barbaric splendor! You have associated with the word _barbaric_, ideas of Oriental and excessive magnificence, laid on without the more refined and chastened taste of modern civilization. It is a word the old Romans used to define _foreign people_, and whatever came to Rome from foreign parts: all the world was barbarous or Roman. We do not use the word in the same sense as barbarous. But with it, in connection with gold and pearls and decorations of the palace, we associate a wealth of luxury and brilliancy of ornamentation, that would suit the meridian of Persia rather than of Paris. Not having seen the palaces of the interior of Asia, I cannot draw a comparison between them and the royal residences of European monarchs. But we are now on the border between the East and the West, between Asia and Europe, between barbarism in its best estate and civilization. Take a map of the world and see where Moscow stands! What vast, uncultured, desolate regions lie at the east of it, and still further on, what empires and peoples that make up the bulk of the human race! Out of the barbarism of that eastern portion of the earth’s plane, Russia is emerging, and Moscow is her frontier town; a wall and a monument: a sign and guide, signifying what Russia has been, and leading on to something higher and better, though the future is still in the depths of political and moral uncertainties.