Pyramids are built with no such object, and make but little show in proportion to their vast mass of material; but then one gets from them a sense of solid magnitude that no other building gives, however vast its proportions may be.

Neither of us had ever seen the Egyptian pyramids.

Even in Mexico these of Teotihuacan are not the largest; for, though the pyramid of Cholula is no higher, it covers far more ground.

Were these monuments in Egypt, they would only rank, from their size, in the second class.
As has often been remarked, such buildings as these can only be raised under peculiar social conditions.

The ruler must be a despotic sovereign, and the mass of the people slaves, whose subsistence and whose lives are sacrificed without scruple to execute the fancies of the monarch, who is not so much the governor as the unrestricted owner of the country and the people.