TSARSKOSELO. 
thus ruined. We were also assured, by au- 
thority we shall not venture to name, that a 
profusion of pictures ' of the Flemish School 
were then lying in a cellar of the palace. But 
the most extraordinary apartment, and that 
which usually attracts the notice of strangers 
more than any other, is a room, about thirty 
feet square, entirely covered, on all sides, from 
top to bottom, with amber; a lamentable waste 
of innumerable specimens of a substance which 
could nowhere have been so ill employed. 
The effect produces neither beauty nor mag- 
nificence. It would have been better expended 
even in ornamenting the heads of Turkish pipes; 
a custom which consumes the greatest quantity 
of this beautiful mineral. The appearance made 
by it on the walls is dull and heavy. It was 
a present from the King of Prussia. In an 
apartment prepared for Prince Potemkin , the 
floor was covered with different sorts of exotic 
wood, interlaid; the expense of which amounted 
to an hundred roubles for every squared archine. 
A profusion of gilding appears in many of the 
other rooms. The ball-room is an hundred and 
forty feet long by fifty-two feet wide, and two 
stories high. The walls and pilasters of another 
apartment were ornamented with lapis-lazuli , 
as well as the tables it contained. The Cabinet 
of Mirrors is a small room lined with large 
