"Mexico City turned out to be everything that Vera Cruz was not in the way of beauty, magnificence, and order. It rises from a lake, joined to the shore by five causeways, each with its own gate. All of the land is owned by the Church and so it is, perforce, a most pious city, in that there is no place to live unless one joins a holy order. There are a score of nunneries and even more monasteries, all of them rich, and besides that a numerous rabble of criollos who sleep in the streets and are forever committing outrages. The Cathedral can only be called stupendous, having a staff of between three and four hundred, headed by an Archbishop who is paid sixty thousand pieces of eight a year. I mention these facts only to convey how impressed I was; had my jaw not been lashed shut by many yards of linen, it would have hung open for a week.