Portions of the wall with its old-fashioned towers are yet standing. One of them is called the Hermann Tower, after the bishop of that name, and is not far distant through public gardens from the cylinder-turreted prison. Revel remained subject to the Danes till 1347, when they sold Esthonia to the Livonian knights for 19,000 marks. From the knights it passed, in 1561, to the Swedes, who held possession until Peter the Great annexed the province. The great Peter was fond of Revel, built himself a house in the neighborhood, and near to it a palace for the Tsarina, which he presented to her by the name of Catherinenthal.

It was in this suburb of Catherinenthal, at the Hôtel de France, we took up our quarters—not very good ones, however, for the house was full of summer visitors. Amongst them we found his Excellency Mr. Kapoustine, whom we had failed to see at Dorpat, and to whom I presented an introduction from [William Ralston Shedden-Ralston|Mr. W. S. Ralston]], a well-known writer upon Russian subjects.

His Excellency kindly accompanied us to the surrounding points of interest. We walked through the gardens and park, which is literally a “bower of verdure” redeemed from a waste of sand, to the modest little Dutch house of that extraordinary man, Peter the Great. It has only three rooms—a dining-room, a bedroom (wherein is preserved his simple mirror, and a tall clock of the period by “R. Andrews, London”), whilst in the sitting-room there is an ikon of the Italian school of painting, a secretary with a marvellous number of secret places for hiding money and valuables, and a zertsalo, or triangular pyramid, which, when uncovered, symbolizes the presence of the Tsar, and before which all heads must be bare.

This little house was built under the rocks of the Laaksberg1, so that from the windows the Tsar could see his infant fleet at anchor in the bay. We climbed the rocks for the sake of the view, and also to visit the light-house, in which we examined the apparatus, made, I observed, by Chance Brothers, of Birmingham, at a cost, we were told, of £1700. The principal light could be seen by ships only when directly in front of it, but there was an ordinary light in the rear, so that mariners knew their relative position, according as they could see one or both the lights. Leaving the light-house, we walked farther in the grounds, which Peter bequeathed as a legacy to Revel. The palace has been a temporary sojourning place of all the sovereigns of Russia; and now suites of apartments therein are granted by the Emperor, I learned, for the summer, to distinguished Russian families.

Mr. M. N. Kapoustine is chief of all the educational affairs in the Baltic provinces, wherein, I was informed, one person in every fifteen (in some parts one in ten) is at school, and that in the three provinces are about 3000 schools and 200,000 scholars. The teaching in the elementary schools is conducted in Lettish and Esthonian, but in the higher establishments in German, the fees for the most expensive schools being £14 a year. Riga has a technical school, a Russian seminary, four gymnasia, and ten private schools, spending annually for her 60,000 German inhabitants, on German education, £18,400, whilst the cost of education among 32,000 Russians and 60,000 Letts amounts to £1200 and £200 respectively.

Revel is a more ancient-looking city than Riga, and possesses more antiquities than any town in the Baltic provinces. The founding of the city by a Danish ruler and the duration of Swedish rule have left their traces behind them, and the approach to the Dom, some of the Gothic walls and turrets of which are standing, is vividly reminiscent of mediaeval times. The large, dingy, fortress-like houses and the grass-grown streets, looked desolate, as if awaiting their owners' return for the winter. The cathedral—where we saw some interesting shields—the cathedral school, the Governor’s palace, and the House of Assembly of the nobles, all looked somewhat woebegone, and as if they had outlived their day.

We visited in the lower town two of the churches, of which there are many, the finest being that of St. Olai, built about half a century ago on the site of a former church of the fourteenth century, which was struck by lightning no less than eight times. The nave appeared remarkably lofty, and the spire is 430 feet high. It stands in a public garden, nearly surrounded by trees, and forms a graceful object in the appearance of the city.

(Continued...)
Hôtel de France, photo credited to Charles Borchardt (1834–1892)

1Laaksberg, or Lasnamäe, was built over in the 1960's with concrete panel housing to accommodate a massive import of Soviet workers.
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