Riga ke)t up her own armies, under the command of her consuls, during the wars with tlie order. The citizens of Riga had, like tlie nobility, their own orders and armed brotherlioods, and among tliese was the bivther-
In French and English books on chivalry tliis order is pcncrally spoken of as tho " Livonian Knights," the " Porte Glaives," or the Eusifcri."
hood of the " Black Heads." They struck their own coins, which bore the impression of the city arms, a combination, no doubt, of the armorial bearings of Bremen and Hamburg. The shield bears two silver keys, crossed over one another, sui-mounted by a cross, underneath which is a gate with three towers.
We even hear mention of armed fleets belonging to Riga ; and at the end of the 15th and beginning of the 16th centuries, at which time the town was in the zenith of its prosperity, descriptions occur of the domestic luxury and pomp of the Riga citizens very similar to those cln'onicled of other wealthy German cities.
During the half-century of Polish domination, and the century of its subjection to Sweden, Riga knew how to maintain and defend its old rights and privileges, and ranked under the Swedish kings as the second city of the kingdom. Ever since the siege and capitulation of 1710, the town has belonged to Russia.
The Dwina at Riga, like the Neva at St. Petersburg, and the Aa at Mitau, has no permanent bridges, and the ice in spring and autumn occasions consequently very inconvenient interruptions to the intercourse of the city with its suburb on the opposite bank. At St. Petersburg the bridges are ships ; but at Mitau and Riga they are only floating bridges, composed of boards and beams, laid across the stream. Thick trunks of trees laid close together in the water form the basis, and are kept together by cross beams. Over these beams lie the oaken planks, which crown the bridge, but which are almost level with the water. The whole bridge can be taken to pieces by being divided into three or four parts, which are conveyed to a harbour destined for their reception.
The morning after the evening in which we had been conversing in the Mitau Vorstadt on the bridges and the history of Riga, the land swarmed with travellers and country people, waiting to take their wares into the city, and the water with little boats and barges, labouring through the floating fragments of ice. I seated myself in a little boat, which could hold only two or three people, for the smaller it is the more easily can it glide through the chasms in the ice. Never have I seen so much life and bustle on a river at a time when so much ice was floating down it. The Lettish and Russian sailors steered their little boats with great skill between the moving masses, now rowing through an open channel, now sticking to one piece of ice, now to another, now warding off" the blow of a third, according as the thousand varied situations and difficulties of an ice passage rendered the one or the other necessary.
The aspect of the Dwina, with its broad, dark, melancholy waters, rushing to the sea in thousands of entangled whirlpools and rapids, with iimumerable large and small crystallisations whirhng about on the wide surface, incessantly forming themselves into new groups and shapes, was very imposing and magnificent. Then the sandbanks covered with icebergs, towering high above each other, standing thirty or forty feet out of the water, and two ells thick; and lastly, the fragile little nutshells struggling through the stormy waters, with butter and cheese for the market, in order to snatch for their owners a Httle profit from the threatening tumult of the Oceanides.
Riga itself was hardly noticeable in the picture. The river is too mighty for the town. Seen from the Dwina, Riga is remarkably unimposmg. It is difficult to beheve that a city containing 60,000 inhabitants lies before us. No great streets, no handsome quays, stretch along the insignificant shore ; all the principal streets of the town are at a distance from the water. The houses of Bremen, Liibeck, and Hamburg form picturesque and attractive groups on the banks of their respective livers ; Riga has none such, and I know no city whose existence depends so entirely on its river, which appears to be so entirely unconnected with it. Scarcely any thing is to be seen of the town but an old wall, and a few steeples peeping over it, and it is only after passing through the dark narrow gates by the water side, that we discover the busy streets and the masses of houses.