There is an interesting association of the Great Pyramid with the ambitious dream of one of the world’s celebrities, which may be noticed here. When Napoleon I. was in Egypt, in 1799, he rode on a camel to the Great Pyramid and the Sphinx, that relic of mystic grandeur. Karl Girardet has painted this impressive visit; and the picture has been engraved by Gautier, and inscribed, “Forty Centuries look down upon him.”
Charles Mackay has written a graceful poem as a pendent to this print; in which the poet makes the young Napoleon thus invoke the colossal monuments:
Ye haughty Pyramids!
Thou Sphinx, whose eyeless lids
On my presumptuous youth seem bent in scorn!
What though thou’st stood
Coeval with the flood,
Of all earth’s monuments the earliest born,
And I so mean and small,
With armies at my call,