n of Frosts and Winters, which make the
Northern Workmen lie half the Year Idle. I might mention too, among the
Benefits of the Climate, what Historians say of the Earth, that it
sweated out a Bitumen or natural kind of Mortar, which is doubtless the
same with that mentioned in Holy Writ, as contributing to the Structure
of Babel. Slime they used instead of Mortar.

In Egypt we still see their Pyramids, which answer to the Descriptions
that have been made of them; and I question not but a traveller might
find out some Remains of the Labyrinth that covered a whole Province,
and had a hundred Temples disposed among its several Quarters and
Divisions.

The Wall of China is one of these Eastern Pieces of Magnificence, which
makes a Figure even in the Map of the World, altho an Account of it
would have been thought Fabulous, were not the Wall it self still
extant.

We are obliged to Devotion for the noblest Buildings that have adornd
the several Countries of the World. It is this which has set Men at work
on Temples and Publick Places of Worship, not only that they might, by
the Magnificence of the Building, invite the Deity to reside within it,
but that such stupendous Works might, at the same time, open the Mind to
vast Conceptions, and fit it to converse with the Divinity of the Place.
For every thing that is Majestick imprints an Awfulness and Reverence on
the Mind of the Beholder, and strikes in with the Natural Greatness of
the Soul.

In the Second place we are to consider Greatness of Manner in
Architecture, which has such Force upon the Imagination, that a small
Building, where it appears, shall give the Mind nobler Ideas than one of
twenty times the Bulk, where the Manner is ordinary or little. Thus,
perhaps, a Man would have been more astonished with the Majestick Air
that appeared in one of [Lysippus's [3]] Statues of Alexander, tho' no
bigger than the Life, than he might have been with Mount Athos, had it
been cut into the Figure of the Hero, according to the Proposal of
Phidias, [4] with a River in one Hand, and a City in the other.

Let any one reflect on the Disposition of Mind he finds in himself, at
his first Entrance into the Pantheon at Rome, and how his Imagination is
filled with something Great and Amazing; and, at the same time, consider
how little, in proportion, he is affected with the Inside of a Gothick
Cathedral, tho' it be five times larger than the other; which can arise
from nothing else,