Tiie Sergleff convent, between St. Petersburg and Peterhof, contains little that is remarkable, unless we reckon as such its Archimandrite, who is a young and handsome man, and was fomnerly an officer In the army. The Preobrashensky church belongs to one of the oldest regiments of guards, founded by Peter the Great, the tenth legion of the Russian Caesars. This church, the " Spass-Preobrashenskoi-Sabor," Is one of the most considerable of the city, and more than any other adorned both without and within, with trophies from conquered nations. The railing that surrounds the churchyard Is formed of Turkish and French cannon. Every three of those three hundred cannon, one large and two smaller, mounted on a granite pedestal, with their mouths pointed downwards, form a colunni. Around the cannon, chains of different thickness, gracefully twined, are hung like garlands between the columns ; on the sununit of each is entlironed a Russian double eagle of iron,
with expanded wings. Within, the church is adorned with flags and halberds, the pillars look like palm-trees of which every leaf is a lance. Here also travellers are shown a production of Russian inventive talent; the work of a common peasant. It is a large, splendid piece of clockwork, made by him in his native village, bought for 20,000 rubles by his lord, and presented to the church. The works are said to be so good as to have stood in no need of repair during the six years the clock has been in the church.
Trinity church is also a modem erection like the Smolnoi convent^ and very similar to it. The exterior offers an example of the very fantastic manner in which the Russians decorate their churches. Under the cornice of the dark blue star-bespangled cupola, an arabesque of vine-leaves and flowers runs all round. The garlands are held up by angels, and between every pair of them a crown of thorns is introduced as a centre. But for this mai'tyr-token of Christianity, we might fancy the gay temple of some Grecian god before us.
The half, and certainly the more important half, of the churches of St. Petersburg are the erections of the present century. The Nicolai church, the church of the Resurrection, and some others of the time of Catherine, are not worth mention in an architectural point of view. In the church of the Resurrection I saw some very singular off(erings to the saints ; among others a patchwork quilt, probably the offering of some devout beggar, and containing the best of her rags. It was made out of a vast number of pieces great and small, woollen, linen, and silk, worked with gold thi'ead, perhaps taken from the cast off epaulets of some officer of the guards, and in the middle a golden cross was sewed on. In the Nicolai chui'ch, which is built in two stories, one for divine service during winter, and the other in summer, I found the fOur small cupolas tenanted by a number of pigeons, who had made their nests there, and were fed by the attendants with the rice which the pious placed there for the dead. I entered the church at the same time with a splendidlyattired merchant's wife, who had just stepped out of her carriage, and called out to her French companion, " Attendez un moment, je veuxfaire mes prieres.''' She went to all the saints' pictures one after the other, made her reverence, ogling them most graciously, and then danced out again with a weU-pleased motion of the head, and drove to another chmch. Among the churches of other confessions, that built by Paul, when he assumed the protectorship of the Maltese Order, is at least interesting. It is quite in the style of the old churches of the Knights of St. John, and still contains the chair on which the emperor sat as grand-master of the order.
The largest catholic church is on the Prospekt, opposite the Kasan church. The priests are Germans, and the sendee half German, half Latin. It is attended by the Poles and Lithuanians, to whom the chanting, by the congregation, of the " immaculate Virgin," " the Queen of Heaven," "the Tower of God," "the Fortress of Zion," in itself sufficiently unintelligible, must be necessarily still more so here. The Russians rarely attend the cathohc service ; if they go to any foreign church it is generally the protestant. The catholics, Greeks, and Armenians (the latter have also a very pretty church on the Prospekt) hold to the doctrine of the Trinity, but the Dutch as it appears to a Duality ; for, on their church stands the singular inscription, "' Deo et salvatori sacrum.^
This church, with its very rich dotation, dates from Peter the Great, when the Dutch were the most considerable merchants, and were endowed by the liberal czar with so much land within the city, that many a Dutch cathedral may envy the church of this Httle northern colony.