Colonists of all kinds rapidly established themselves in Livonia, and while the industry of the merchants raised prosperous cities and safe harbours along the river and the seaboard, the nobles dotted the land with their castles and strongholds, and the clergy with their churches and convents. It was a special characteristic of this greater Germany that it faithfully retained and reproduced the outward features of the mother-land. With German speech, German law and German customs had become naturalized. On the gates of the citadels the knights beheld the same coats of arms that greeted their eyes at home. In the towns were seen the same architectural features, the same tightly-packed gabled houses, with their quaint projecting storeys, and their yawning cellars, for the storage of goods; the cocklofts, with their heavy, pendant cranes, that distinguished the northern cities and made them all resemble, more or less, those toy towns of our childhood that come from Nürnberg, and are so deftly packed into their box that, once removed, no unskilled fingers can replace them. The monks and the priests, on their part, formed in Livonia their accustomed cells, their silent cloisters, the glory and weird wonder of the Gothic cathedral, with its tall, pointed spires and steeples, its coloured glass windows, through which the northern sunlight broke in soft rays, staining the floors of God's house with glory. In a word, everything here reproduced mediæval Germany. Of the natives of the land there was little trace, though some of these still lingered in the country and ventured secretly to pay worship to their old deposed gods in sacred thickets and on lonely heaths. To this day Livonia retains its German character; the German language still reigns supreme there, German customs prevail, German names survive. In the times we speak of it was entirely under Teutonic sway. Was this rich, important colony to be lost to the mother-land and to the Hansa that had created it? No wonder the League was alarmed. Nor was it alone in its fears. Sweden and all the West took fright. In imagination, they already beheld the East--in the shape of Russia and its barbarous dependencies--descending upon them with the weapons furnished to them by England. At the instigation of the King of Sweden and of the Livonians, who, in 1556, expressed their fears on this subject before the Hanseatic Diet, the League, desirous to dispel this European peril, warned the Emperor of Germany, the Kings of Denmark, England, and Poland, and the Duke of Prussia, not to facilitate Russia's projects of invasion by putting at her disposal either the munitions of war or the means that would help to civilize her, and thus render her yet more redoubtable.