"Mountebank" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... may it please your reverences, that in all our numerous family, for these four generations, we count no more than one archbishop, a Welch judge, some three or four aldermen, and a single mountebank— ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... of his friend, and has certainly fully redeemed his pledge, in this and the following pasquinades. Mad Mullinix, or Molyneux, was a sort of crazy beggar, a Tory politician in His madness, who haunted the streets of Dublin about this time. In a paper subscribed Dr. Anthony, apparently a mountebank of somewhat the same description, the doctor is made to vindicate his loyalty and regard for the present constitution in church and state, by declaring that he always acted contrary to the politics of Captain John ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... of taking fees at Westminster Abbey is of very ancient date, and was always unpopular. Shirley alludes to it in his pleasant comedy called The Bird in a Cage, when Bonomico, a mountebank, observes— ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 76, April 12, 1851 • Various
... of itinerant, mountebank, conjurer, cheat, sophist, and sorcerer, heaped upon the teachers of Christianity; sometimes to account for the report or apparent truth of their miracles, sometimes to explain their success. Our Lord was said to have learned his miraculous power in Egypt; "wizard, mediciner, cheat, rogue, conjurer," ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... eternal welfare. He quite laid himself out for our conversion, coming to sit with us at breakfast in our Mormon hotel, dressed in a black swallow-tail, buff vest, and a stupendous truncate cone of Leghorn, which made him look like an Italian mountebank-physician of the seventeenth century. I have heard men who could misquote Scripture for their own ends, and talk a long while without saying anything; but he so far surpassed in these particulars the loftiest efforts within my former experience, that I could ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... apologize Now that you've brought me. As I said at first, I am prepared to see a mountebank Perform his pretty tricks of eloquence To set the crowd agape. Why, once a week The Ethical Society hires one To work the same performance—quite the same Each time. Unearth a few forgotten doubts, Or dig your elbow into some new dogma, ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... "What mountebank trick is this?" demanded the stranger, angrily; but, as his eye glanced over the figure of the page, his countenance rapidly changed, and in ...
— The Rivals of Acadia - An Old Story of the New World • Harriet Vaughan Cheney
... read," says Dr. Sanderson, in the following words of the same letter, "his Epistle Dedicatory to the Pope (Gregory XV.), he spake so highly of his own invention, that I then began rather to suspect him for a mountebank, than to hope I should find satisfaction from his performances. I found much confidence and great pomp of words, but little matter as to the main knot of the business, other than had been said an hundred times before, ...
— Lives of John Donne, Henry Wotton, Rich'd Hooker, George Herbert, - &C, Volume Two • Izaak Walton
... sit down for a moment. Brigit, you are a very foolish woman. Hush, I will tell you why. Firstly, because you are going to marry the son of that musical mountebank; and secondly, because you seem bound to make an enemy ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... the pearl-buttoned velveteen suit whose magnificence he had enhanced by newly purchased steel-buckled shoes and black stockings, and to a less bigoted worshipper than me I suppose he must have looked a mountebank Tomfool; but I only ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... awake," said the Emperor curtly. "Hark you—you seem to be a clever mountebank, and I know what power fellows of your sort have over the mob—add to your play lines to be spoken by your puppet King. They should convey this meaning—that although he is a King he is but a puppet incapable of independent action. Puppets that ...
— Masters of the Guild • L. Lamprey
... Name and Profession of a Christian, was written to show no one ought to bear that name, who does not practise the rules of this profession, and who has not its spirit, without which, a man may perform exterior duties, but will upon occasions betray himself, and forget his obligation. When a mountebank at Alexandria had taught an ape dressed in woman's clothes to dance most ingeniously, the people took it for a woman, till one threw some almonds on the stage; for then the beast could no longer contain, but tearing off its clothes, went about the stage picking ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... a zany: and Nelson, with his flaming stars and cordons, splendent upon a day of battle, was a madman: and Murat, with his crosses and orders, at the head of his squadrons charging victorious, was only a crazy mountebank, who had been a tavern-waiter, and was puffed up with absurd vanity about his dress and legs. And the men of the French line at Fontenoy, who told Messieurs de la Garde to fire first, were smirking French dancing-masters; and the Black Prince, ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... masks and dominoes of the mind! what mountebank ever wore so many disguises as the heart of man? If some potent spirit of evil had suddenly converted Elm Lodge into the palace of Truth, the light of its master's countenance would have grown dark as he read the thoughts that were passing in my breast; and instead of bestowing upon me the ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... plaintiff's patented inventions, and call upon him to prove them. I not only call upon him to prove them, but I defy him to prove them. It will take something more than superannuated doctors, stolen letters and the performances of a mountebank to ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... beg, better be errand-boy or lackey, than waste my talents on such an ungrateful world. I'll turn conjurer—fire-eater—mountebank; set the fools agape at fairs and pastimes. Anything rather than killing—starving by inches. Why, the criminals at hard labour in the fortress have less work and better fare. I ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... shook hands heartily and held a great festival. Throughout civilized Europe a sort of carnival of empiricism prevailed. Quack was king. A spurious leaven of charlatanism was traceable in politics, in science, in religion—pervaded all things indeed. The world was mad to cheat or to be cheated. The mountebank enjoyed his saturnalia. Never had he exhibited his exploits before an audience so numerous and so sympathetic—so eager to be swindled, so liberal in rewarding the swindler. Gravely does Miss Hannah More address Mr. Horace ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... blood, being masked, took no rank there. Mme. la Duchesse de Bourgogne and Madame had arm-chairs in the center of the hall. The Duchesse de Bourgogne was surprised to see a splendid theater, adorned with her arms and monogram. . . . As soon as the princess was seated, Bari, the famous mountebank of Paris, came forward and asked her protection against the doctors, and having extolled the excellence of his remedies, and the marvels of his secrets, he offered to the princess as a little diversion a comedy such as they sometimes played at Paris. There was given then a little comedy which Mme. ...
— The Story of Versailles • Francis Loring Payne
... the speech which ran into him suddenly, and put him in a worse mood. So he had National Participled the unconscious Corporal with most hearty emphasis, and had made up his mind to think no more about such a mountebank. ...
— Somebody's Luggage • Charles Dickens
... farmer, very near about my own age, and altogether a most prepossessing and intelligent young man. I first met wi' him at my youngest sister's goodman's kirn,[F] and I must say, a better or a more gracefu' dancer I never saw upon a floor. He had neither the jumping o' a mountebank, nor the sliding o' a play-actor, but there was an ease in his carriage which I never saw equalled. I was particularly struck wi' him, and especially his dancing; and it so happened that he was no less struck wi' me. I thought he looked even better than ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... the largesse that Henry delighted to dispense, and peasants had poured in from all the villages around, but no sort of entertainment was lacking. Here were minstrels and story-tellers gathering groups around them; here was the mountebank, clearing a stage in which to perform feats of jugglery, tossing from one hand to another a never- ending circle of balls, balancing a lance upon his nose, with a popinjay on its point; here were a bevy ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge
... said Jonah, "I appeal to you all to let that dog-eared mountebank rake over his muck-heap, and ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... Jonah, "is the sodden mountebank who dares to cast a stone into the limpid pool of my character. That ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... the bridegroom, 'my all-sufficing friend, among his other talents, does not think that of a mountebank beneath his cultivation.' ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... have a better plan," continued the mountebank. "Let's go and entertain the revolutionists. ...
— The Broncho Rider Boys with Funston at Vera Cruz - Or, Upholding the Honor of the Stars and Stripes • Frank Fowler
... you that your revelations, whatever they are, will utterly fail to move me. Though you should declare yourself to be the daughter of a thief, a costermonger, or a chimpanzee monkey— though you should profess yourself to have been a charwoman, a foundling, a Billingsgate fish-woman, or a female mountebank—my feelings and resolves will remain the same. Sufficient for me to know that you are you, and that you are ...
— My Doggie and I • R.M. Ballantyne
... never in his life known what it was to associate with gentlemen, should have managed to get the best of the Duke of Vallombreuse, hitherto by common accord pronounced invincible? He must be a professional prize-fighter, disguised as a strolling mountebank." ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... said Josh, with his grave good humor of the great man tolerating the antics of a mountebank, "you'll appreciate it wasn't the subject that was dull, but the ears. For the day'll come when everybody'll be thinking and talking about ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... the mountebank, standing in the midst of the courtyard, raised his grotesque hat, and made us a very ceremonious bow, paying his compliments very volubly in execrable French, and ...
— Carmilla • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... anecdote which is related by Addison. He says that in his time there was a man who made a living by cheating the country people. He was not a Cabinet Minister,—he was only a mountebank,—and he set up a stall, and sold pills that were very good against the earthquake. Well, that is about the state of things that we are in now. There is an earthquake in Ireland. Does anybody doubt it? I will not go into the evidence of it, but I will ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright
... told himself. He had staked all on this one bold throw; no use. Probably if she thought of him at all it was to label him a cheap joker, a mountebank of the halfpenny press. Richly he deserved ...
— The Agony Column • Earl Derr Biggers
... credit for his invention, in propagating the report that I had a quarrel with a mountebank's merry Andrew at Gloucester: but I have too much respect for every appendage of wit, to quarrel even with the lowest buffoonery; and therefore I hope Mansel and I shall always be good friends. I cannot, however, approve of his drowning my ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... A mountebank had promised the citizens of Carthage to discover to them their most secret thoughts, in case they would come, on a day appointed, to hear him. Being all met, he told them, they were desirous to buy cheap and sell dear. Every man's conscience pleaded guilty to the charge; and the ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... literature. He had seen Tarrant, or his equivalent, often before; he had "whipped" him, as he believed, controversially, again and again, at political meetings in blighted Southern towns, during the horrible period of reconstruction. If Mrs. Farrinder had looked at Verena Tarrant as if she were a mountebank, there was some excuse for it, inasmuch as the girl made much the same impression on Basil Ransom. He had never seen such an odd mixture of elements; she had the sweetest, most unworldly face, and yet, with it, an air of being on exhibition, of belonging to a troupe, of living in the gaslight, ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... again!" cried good Mr. Wilson. "I feared the woman had no better thought than to make a mountebank of her child!" ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... who is examining an urinal. This picture is wonderfully true to nature, and each particular hair and pore of the skin is represented. In the gallery at Florence is one of his pictures, representing an interior by candle-light, with a mountebank, surrounded by a number of clowns, which is exquisitely finished. The great fame of Gerhard Douw, and the eager desire for his works, have given rise to numerous counterfeits. We may safely say that there is not an original picture by this artist in the United States. Douw ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner
... course; the Union was suddenly supposed to lie at the point of dissolution, and what we may call the Doctor-Brandreth style of oratory began. Every orator mounted the rostrum, like a mountebank at a fair, to proclaim the virtues of his private panacea for the morbid Commonwealth, and, as was natural in young students of political therapeutics, fancied that he saw symptoms of the dread malady of Disunion in a simple eruption of Jethro Furber at ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... Impudence and many Words are as necessary to these Itinerary Galens as a laced Hat or a Merry Andrew, yet they would turn very little to the Advantage of the Owner, if there were not some inward Disposition in the sick Man to favour the Pretensions of the Mountebank. Love of Life in the one, and of Mony in the other, creates a good ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... good people of England,' and professing at the outset that he was an author writing for the public, who expected from the public payment for his work, and that he preferred this course to gambling for the patronage of men in office. Having pleasantly shown the sordid spirit that underlies the mountebank's sublime ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... "Self-opinionated old mountebank," Harleston thought, as he went down the corridor to Carpenter's office. "I shall enjoy watching Spencer make all kinds of an ass of him. 'You impressible chaps!—not dangerous to me!' Oh, Lord, the patronizing bumptiousness of the man!... Have you anything ...
— The Cab of the Sleeping Horse • John Reed Scott
... crowned head, gowned than armed, frocked than frockless; but seeketh after him whose conversation is the more peaceful, more civil, more loyal, and more profitable.' This manifesto, in the style of a mountebank, must have sounded like a trumpet-blast to set the humdrum English doctors with sleepy brains and moldy science on their guard against a man whom they naturally regarded as an Italian charlatan. What, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... "What a mountebank art thou with thy 'Ah'! Look here, now. Does some disease of the mind or body, by contracting your muscles, bring back of a morning the wild horses that tear you in pieces at night, as with Damiens once upon ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... stated to have been a woman and an hermaphrodite. She is the strolling singer or mountebank of the Immortals. Usually she plays a flute or a pair of cymbals. Her origin is unknown, but her personal name is said to have been Yang Su, and her career is assigned to the period of the T'ang dynasty. She wandered abroad clad in a tattered blue ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... Mormon community begins to prevail, and with it comes a conviction that questions are involved in its relations to the parent government which are not exceeded in importance by any that have ever been agitated at Washington. Brigham Young no longer seems to the American public a religious mountebank, only one grade removed from the man Orr, who claimed to be the veritable Angel Gabriel, and was killed in a popular commotion which he had himself excited in Dutch Guiana. On the contrary, he begins to appear as a man of great native strength and scope ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... and thy vain employs, away From this too oft deluded breast! No longer will I court thy stay, To be my bosom's teasing guest. Thou treacherous medicine—reckon'd pure; Thou quackery of the harass'd heart, That kills what it pretends to cure, Life's mountebank ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... not quite mean it—this excellent advice. We have grown accustomed to these gew-gaws, and we should miss them in spite of our knowledge of their trashiness: you, your palace and your little gold crown; I, my mountebank's cap, and the answering laugh that goes up from the crowd when I shake my bells. We want everything. All the happiness that earth and heaven are capable of bestowing. Creature comforts, and heart and soul comforts also; ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... Concrete inflamable like Sulphur; concerning which I shall not now say any thing, since I can Referr You to the Diligent Observations which I remember Mr. Boyle has made concerning this Odde kind of Verdigrease. But Continues Carneades smiling, you know I was not cut out for a Mountebank, and therefore I will hasten to resume the person of a Sceptick, and take up my discourse where You diverted ...
— The Sceptical Chymist • Robert Boyle
... perfect, to be sure; than that of Garnerin, but still a practical machine, was described 189 years before the great aeronaut's feat at Paris. We read in the narrative of the ambassador of Louis XIV at Siam, at the end of the seventeenth century, the following passage—"A mountebank at the court of the King of Siam climbed to the top of a high bamboo-tree, and threw himself into the air without any other support than two parasols. Thus equipped, he abandoned himself to the winds, which carried him, as by chance, sometimes to the earth, sometimes ...
— Wonderful Balloon Ascents - or, the Conquest of the Skies • Fulgence Marion
... worthy. Where her guns Had raked the seas, barrels of ale were sprung, Bestrid by roaring tipplers. Where at night The storm-beat crew silently bowed their heads With Drake before the King of Life and Death, A strumpet wrestled with a mountebank For pence, a loose-limbed Lais with a clown Of Cherry Hilton. Leering at their lewd twists, Cross-legged upon the deck, sluggish with sack, Like a squat toad sat Puff ... Propped up against the bulwarks, at his side, Archer, ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... it is, I am not one of those genial fellows, half boys themselves, who can join in the sports con amore; I should only make a mountebank of myself if I tried, and the boys would distrust ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... mountebank three persons seemed especially amused by the peroration. They were two gentlemen, very elegant and distinguished, in evening clothes, and with them a pretty woman wearing a loose silk mantle ...
— The Exploits of Juve - Being the Second of the Series of the "Fantmas" Detective Tales • mile Souvestre and Marcel Allain
... event occurred at D—— A man was condemned to death for murder. He was a wretched fellow, not exactly educated, not exactly ignorant, who had been a mountebank at fairs, and a writer for the public. The town took a great interest in the trial. On the eve of the day fixed for the execution of the condemned man, the chaplain of the prison fell ill. A priest was needed to attend the criminal in his last moments. ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... the pine plantations in which the countryside abounded. Paul smoked pipe after pipe, and he knew very well that if anybody had been there to look at him, he would have seemed unmoved, and yet he seemed to himself more than once to be playing the mountebank with his own trouble, as when, for instance, the lines came ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... time been the Middle Ages, or the place a strange quarter of the Orient, I might not have been so shocked at the knowledge which a tawdry machine, or the mountebank behind it, seemed to have of the affairs of persons against whom no charge of contact with the lower strata of life could be brought. But in our civilization, where nothing but the commonplace is to be expected, I ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... shaking hands with each other. This lasted a few minutes, and then the crowd gathered in silence round one man, who spoke with angry vehemence and gesticulation, stamping, and frequently wiping his forehead. We thought he was a mountebank haranguing the populace, till we saw that he wore a uniform. Listening with curiosity to hear what he was saying, we observed that he looked up towards us, and we thought we heard him pronounce the names of my father and brother in tones of insult. We could scarcely believe what we heard him ...
— Richard Lovell Edgeworth - A Selection From His Memoir • Richard Lovell Edgeworth
... an intricate illusion. God is a pack of lies under which man staggers to his grave. And man—ah, here we have Nature's only mountebank; here we have Nature's humorous and ingenuous experiment in tragedy. And thought—ah, the tissue-paper chimera that seeks forever ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... mankind by your cruelties and your crimes. You have murdered your mother. You have murdered your wife. You are an incendiary. And not content with perpetrating these enormous atrocities, you have degraded yourself in the eyes of all Rome to the level of the lowest mountebank and buffoon, so as to make yourself the object of contempt as well as abhorrence. ...
— Nero - Makers of History Series • Jacob Abbott
... the young Milesian had been distinguished in the exercise of vaulting. "Leap-frog" had been his especial delight; and no mountebank could bound to a greater height than he. At this crisis he remembered his old accomplishment, and called ...
— The Boy Slaves • Mayne Reid
... league with his she-apothecary; and because it is the physician, the husband is patient. If he have leisure to be idle (that is to study,) he has a smatch at alcumy, and is sick of the philosopher's stone; a disease uncurable, but by an abundant phlebotomy of the purse. His two main opposites are a mountebank and a good woman, and he never shews his learning so much as in an invective against them and their boxes. In conclusion, he is a sucking consumption, and a very brother to the worms, for they are both engendered out of ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... this sort of business a man has got to take his life in his hand. Precautions are pretty well useless. In nine cases out of ten the assassin—I mean the fellow who wants to be an assassin and tries to be an assassin—is a mere mountebank, who might be safely allowed to shoot at you or stab at you as long as he likes and no harm done. Why? Because the creature is nervous, and afraid to risk his own life. Get the man who wants to kill you, and does not care about his own life—is willing and ready to die ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... have not understood. You have not guessed its secret food. You have not seen its single eye; But fear and doubt and jealousy Have risen, and now your love is trembling Like a mountebank dissembling When his trick's detected. Come! To find home we ...
— Household Gods • Aleister Crowley
... in Paris by this society was like a report sent thither from an army in the field by one of the legislative spies who accompanied the generals of the Republic, and swaggered about in the camps wearing the mountebank costumes which may be studied with amusement and advantage in the museum of the Revolution established this year in the Pavillon de Flore at Paris. The members of this Societe Populaire openly pillaged the churches and convents, made ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... believe, never paid him—he now prostitutes his fine talent to the superficialness of public taste, and blots his way to emolument and oblivion. There is commonly, however, fault on both sides; in the artist for exhibiting his dexterity by mountebank tricks of the brush, until chaste finish, requiring ten times the knowledge and labor, appears insipid to the diseased taste which he has himself formed in his patrons, as the roaring and ranting of a common actor will oftentimes ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... Webb was then, as now, the constructive encyclopaedist, the man who, wherever he went, "knew more than anybody present." "The truth of the matter is that Webb and I are very useful to each other. We are in perfect contrast, each supplying the deficiency in the other.... As I am an incorrigible mountebank, and Webb is one of the simplest of geniuses, I have always been in the centre of the stage, whilst Webb has been prompting me, invisible, from the side." It was this singular union more than anything else which gave direction and motive force to the ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... none of them. Work I abhorred with a detestation worthy of a scion of nobility; and, I believe, you could just as soon have persuaded the lineal representative of the Howards or Percys to exhibit himself in the character of a mountebank, as have got me to trust my person on the pinnacle of a three-legged stool. The rule of three is all very well for base mechanical souls; but I flatter myself I have an intellect too large to be limited to a ledger. "Augustus," said my poor mother to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... those little mountebank doctors that go about the streets, and say this, that, and the other, and tell you as many lies in one half-hour as you would find in seven years; but what I does, I does clean before your eyes, and ladies and gentlemen, if you won't believe your own ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... to listen to the monkeys that chattered without offending; to watch them occupied with the unserious business of their lives. With that luxuriant tropical nature, its green clouds and illusive aerial spaces, full of mystery, they harmonized well in language, appearance, and motions—mountebank angels, living their fantastic lives far above earth in a half-way ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... forsook the brilliant prospects of the bar. Yes, he set himself down in the prime of his young manhood to make his bread by his pen. At that time the cow with seven horns, or the calf with two heads and five legs, exhibited in some mountebank's show, was not half so rare ...
— The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850 • Albert Smyth
... man started up and eclipsed the EARL OF SOMERSET. This was GEORGE VILLIERS, the youngest son of a Leicestershire gentleman: who came to Court with all the Paris fashions on him, and could dance as well as the best mountebank that ever was seen. He soon danced himself into the good graces of his Sowship, and danced the other favourite out of favour. Then, it was all at once discovered that the Earl and Countess of Somerset had not deserved all those great promotions and mighty rejoicings, ...
— A Child's History of England • Charles Dickens
... as a last resort, without enthusiasm or the true vocational instinct. The false standards he sets up for his pupils are a natural result of his own ineffectual worship of the fetish of virtuosity—those of the musical mountebank of a hundred years ago. Of course such false prophets of the virtuose have nothing in common with such high-priests of public utterance as Ysaye, Kreisler and others, whose virtuosity is a true means for the higher development of the musical. The encouragement of musicianship in general suffers ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... moment consider that Vicente, friend and adviser of King Jo[a]o III, the grave town-councillor whose influence could check the fanaticism of the monks at Santarem—can we imagine them bowing before a mere mountebank, a strolling player?—was looked upon simply as a Court jester. The impression left by his plays is, rather, that of the worthy thoughtful face of Velazquez as painted in his Las Meninas picture, a figure closely ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... early, even in the nursery. Without the mountebank pretence, that miracles can be performed by the turning of a straw, or the dictatorial anathematizing tone, which calls down vengeance upon those who do not follow to an iota the injunctions of a theorist, we ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... behind her comes a sinuous, coffee-skinned slave girl with that erect majesty of one who has worn crowns or carried water pitchers through generations. Behind the slave follows the flute player, a mountebank, horribly twisted in some manner not visible in the twilight. The PRINCE, who has permitted the carriage to go by him in a wonderment intensified by the beauty of the blind girl, walks ...
— Clair de Lune - A Play in Two Acts and Six Scenes • Michael Strange
... my country, but that I know the description of those who fall within the legal meaning of this odious term. You must give me leave to inform you, friend, that I am neither bearward, fencer, stroller, gipsy, mountebank, nor mendicant; nor do I practise subtle craft, to deceive and impose upon the king's lieges; nor can I be held as an idle disorderly person, travelling from place to place, collecting monies by virtue ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... understand poetry. The whole matter-of-fact assembly was there by a misapprehension, nor did they, for the most part, know what they had come out for to see. There are some words that draw a public as unfailingly as the clash of cymbals, the trumpet, or the mountebank's big drum; "beauty," "glory," "poetry," are words that bewitch the ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... firing away in the cause of Mossop and Smock-alley play-house; 'why, she would be fraudulently arrested in her own chair, on her way to the play-house, by the contrivance of the rogue Barry, and that wicked mountebank, Woodward.' ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... partridge lying dead over there is my partridge. Because the land you are standing on is my land. Because my own land was only taken from me by a crime, and a worse crime than poaching. This has been a single estate for hundreds and hundreds of years, and if you or any meddlesome mountebank comes here and talks of cutting it up like a cake, if I ever hear a word more of you and ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... hearers usually join him; especially the ladies, as these showers are intended for them. However, no one can sit for an hour and hear John. B. Gough, without coming to the conclusion that he is nothing more than a theatrical mountebank. ...
— Three Years in Europe - Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met • William Wells Brown
... our bold Briton, without fear or awe, O'erleaps at once the whole Apocrypha; Invades the Psalms with rhymes, and leaves no room For any Vandal Hopkins yet to come. But when, if, after all, this godly gear Is not so senseless as it would appear, Our mountebank has laid a deeper train; His cant, like Merry Andrew's noble vein, Cat-calls the sects to draw them in again. At leisure hours in epic song he deals, Writes to the rumbling of his coach's wheels; Prescribes in haste, and seldom kills by rule, But rides triumphant between ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... free thought—in the popular sense—will have become universal, when art shall have lost its meaning, worship its holiness, when the Bible will only exist in 'comic' editions, and Shakespeare be down-cried by 'most sweet voices as a mountebank of reactionary tendencies. ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... empty but for their attendants, were flying up to the famous ball-room floor of the Bizarre, to descend heavy-laden with languid laughing parties of gaily-costumed ladies and gentlemen no less brilliantly attired—prince and pauper, empress and shepherdess, monk, milkmaid, and mountebank: all weary yet ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... curious tales related of the mystic henbane may be quoted one noticed by Gerarde, who says: "The root boiled with vinegar, and the same holden hot in the mouth, easeth the pain of the teeth. The seed is used by mountebank tooth-drawers, which run about the country, to cause worms to come forth of the teeth, by burning it in a chafing-dish of coles, the party holding his mouth over the fume thereof; but some crafty companions, to gain money, convey small lute-strings ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... this jargon?" said the prince, in visible astonishment and secret awe. "Comest thou to menace me in my own halls, or wouldst thou warn me of a danger? Art thou some itinerant mountebank, or some unguessed-of friend? Speak out, and plainly. ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... think he's a spy, some guess he's a mountebank, some say one thing, some another: but, for my own part, ...
— The Beaux-Stratagem • George Farquhar
... irresistibly comical! You must see him do the headwaiter—hear him blarney and flabbergast the complaining guest, observe him reckon up his criminal bill, see the subtle condescension of his tip grabbing. This Tich, I assure you, is no common mountebank, but a first-rate comic actor. Given legs eighteen inches longer and an equator befitting the role, he would make the best Falstaff of our generation. Even as he stands, he would do wonders with Bob Acres—and I'd give four dollars any day to ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... her duties: she merely reigns, and leaves us to govern; but I can tell you, no Prioress of this convent would have an easy life, if she did her duty. I remember once, when I was in the world, I saw a mountebank driving ten horses at once. I dare say he hadn't an easy time of it. But, lack-a-day! we have to drive thirty: and skittish fillies some of them are. I don't know what Sister Roberga has done with her vocation: but I never saw the corner of ...
— In Convent Walls - The Story of the Despensers • Emily Sarah Holt
... to which the eyes of hundreds of thousands were turned with anxious interest, Gloucestershire. Would the patriotic and high spirited gentry and yeomanry of that great county again confide their dearest interests to the Impudent Scandal of parliaments, the renegade, the slanderer, the mountebank, who had been, during thirteen years, railing at his betters of every party with a spite restrained by nothing but the craven fear of corporal chastisement, and who had in the last Parliament made himself conspicuous by the abject court which he had ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... He attacked them all, with scarcely an exception. This one sold his pen to the highest bidder; that one levied contributions of all sorts on the vanity of authors and artists; another was a mere actor; a fourth was nothing but a mountebank; a fifth was a mere babbler; and so on he went through the whole catalogue of authors. The illustrious literary democrats were Liberals and Spartans only for the public eye. They cared as much about liberty as about old moons: ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the coffee itself had the appearance of "Pluto's diet-drink, that witches tipple out of dead men's skulls;" and the company included "a silly fop and a worshipful justice, a griping rook and a grave citizen, a worthy lawyer and an errant pickpocket, a reverend non-conformist and a canting mountebank, all blended together to compose an oglio of impertinence." There is a delightful sketch of one named "Captain All-man-sir," as big a boaster as Falstaff, and a more delicately etched portrait of the Town Wit, who is summed up as the "jack-pudding of society" in the ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... I happen to know you as a mountebank, and therefore trust you no more than THIS." She indicated her little finger. "And who is THAT?" she went on, turning towards Mlle. Blanche. Evidently the Frenchwoman looked so becoming in her riding-habit, with her whip in her hand, ...
— The Gambler • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... thing Gilbert said: that Dickens was "accused of superficiality by those who cannot grasp that there is foam upon deep seas." That was the matter in dispute about himself, and very furiously disputed it was during these years. Was G.K. serious or merely posing, was he a great man or a mountebank, was he clear or obscure, was he a genius or a charlatan? "Audacious reconciliation," he pleaded—or rather asserted, for his tone could seldom be called a plea, "is a mark not of frivolity but of ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... would have him bring his trained cockatoos. And while he was making them go through their tricks, Mr. Hume would call him a mountebank, a side show fakir and other things, and tell him that he ought to stick to that as a business, for he could make a living at it, where he would starve as a violinist. I've often seen Antonio go out trembling and white at the lips with rage. Several times he's ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Investigator • John T. McIntyre
... of course, know that that bottle of red ink was a cheap, theatrical trick of a mountebank, a creature who is the laughing-stock of the press and the public, in his idiotic attempts to draw sensational notoriety upon himself. But I do know that this effort has failed! You have dared to plant this outrageous, puerile trap to attempt to ensnare me! You have dared to strike blindly, in your ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... Queen, who had always shared with her whatever of danger there might be in the attempts, argue as to the manner in which they ought to be dealt with." The historian adds, "The ambition which moved most or all the miscreants who thus disturbed the Queen and the country, was that of the mountebank rather than the assassin." It merited contempt no less than severity. A bill was brought forward on the 12th of July, and passed on the 16th, making such attacks punishable, as high misdemeanours, by transportation for seven years, or imprisonment with or without hard labour for a term not exceeding ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... popular traditions, largely of medieval origin, which in the latter part of the sixteenth century came to be associated with an actual individual of the name of Faustus whose notorious career during the first four decades of the century, as a pseudo-scientific mountebank, juggler and magician can be traced through various parts of Germany. The Faust Book of 1587, the earliest collection of these tales, is of prevailingly theological character. It represents Faust as a sinner and reprobate, and it holds up his compact with Mephistopheles and his subsequent ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... a mountebank—a meddler, that's what he is. The sooner we come to realise it, the better," exclaimed the over-heated Duke. "He has greater influence over our beloved Prince than any one else in the royal household. He has no business here—none whatsoever. His presence and his meddling is ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... is the highest glory that a man should be called upon to die. To them Socrates was no more than an idle lounger in the public places and corners of the streets; grotesque, and even repulsive in his person; affecting in the oddities of his walking and in his appearance many of the manners of the mountebank. Neglecting the pursuit of an honest calling, for his trade seems to have been that of a stone-cutter, he wasted his time in discoursing with such youths as his lecherous countenance and satyr-like person could gather around him, leading them astray from the gods ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... there!" she said, fixing her eyes upon him with an expression of mournful gratitude. "You actually left your business and the calls of public duty to see the poor mountebank ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... object. And now my fellow-citizens, here assembled, want me to convince them that I am a great artist by taking my collar off. I won't do it. I simply will not do it. It's too English. If any person wishes to be convinced that I'm an artist and not a mountebank, let him look at my work (pointing vaguely to a picture), because that's all the proof that I mean to offer. If he is blind or shortsighted I regret it, but my neck ...
— The Great Adventure • Arnold Bennett
... to disputing, which is the grave of all truth and all strength. I am, and always have been, artist before everything else. I know that mere politicians look on artists, with great contempt, judging them by some of those mountebank-types which are a disgrace to art. But you, my friend, you well know that a real artist is as useful as the priest and the warrior, and that when he respects what is true and what is good, he is in the right path where the divine blessing ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... in heaven, he would blaspheme God to His face for a monster and come to hell to burn with me forever—come with a joke and a song, telling me never to mind, that we'd have a fine time there in hell in spite of everything! That was what I knew of my poor, cheap, fiddle-playing mountebank of a father. Just a moment more—this is what you must remember of me, in whatever I have to say hereafter, that after that night I never ceased to suffer all the hell my father could be suffering, and I suffered it until my mind went out in that sickness. But, listen now: whatever has happened—I'm ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... dreaming. From the mufflers in which his father, the mountebank, has wrapped the child, to carry him across the heath, a little tumbling-boy emerges in soiled tights. He is half asleep. His father scrapes the fiddle. The boy shortens his red belt, kisses his fingers to us, and ties himself into a knot among the ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... mountebank. I don't want any of your roundabout words for truth; we're not writing a Bible essay. I try my best ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... to come,' said the mountebank, 'are only revealed after long preparation. For them must he gaze into the dark poor of the future. The present and the past he can divine by the mere touch of what has belonged ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... because he will defend his friend to the last. Perhaps by this, in your insane vanity, you hope to justify yourself as a seer and prophetess, instead of being forced to the admission that you are nothing but a mountebank, an unscrupulous mountebank—and even worse. But I will humor you. I will show you how your own words are coming back on you. I had almost forgotten them, so lost was I in my foolish belief in your powers. You told me there ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... Addison, in the 240th Tatler, "when our whole island was shaken with an earthquake some years ago, that there was an impudent mountebank who sold pills, which, as he told the country people, were 'very good ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... the man who was. Much for James Scarlett, tamer of lions and general mountebank," I said, laughing down the rising tide of bitterness. Why had she stirred those dark waters? I had drowned myself in them long since. Under them lay the corpse of a man I had ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... memory. Yet they appear to have no real veneration for any of their idols; nor do they hesitate to profane the temples, by smoking their pipes, and taking refreshments, and even by gambling, within the consecrated precincts. The priests are shameless impostors. They practise the mountebank sciences of astrology, divination, necromancy, and animal magnetism, and keep for sale a liquid, which, they pretend, will confer immortality ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... only embarked in certainties," replied Danglars, with the air of a mountebank sounding his own praises; "to involve me, three ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the terrorism with which they surrounded themselves. The horrors of the French revolution, then raging, aided them mainly, and using that as a raw-head and bloody-bones, they were enabled by their stratagems of X. Y. Z. in which ——— was a leading mountebank, their tales of tub-plots, ocean-massacres, bloody-buoys, and pulpit-lyings and slanderings, and maniacal ravings of their Gardiners, their Osgoods, and Parishes, to spread alarm into all but the firmest breasts. Their Attorney General had the impudence to say to a republican member, that deportation ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... and show us that we have profound reason to admire this lying teacher, this cheating miracle monger, whom he holds up between us and the pure 'Son of Mary.' But it does not answer. In this cold climate a lie is a lie, a cheat is a cheat, and a mountebank and impostor is not the teacher of 'the ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... and woman, between joy and grief, were half hysterical. They talked to the toad-like mountebank in the most endearing tones, evidently believing it was their dead baby toddling before them. Two or three times the same horrible imposture was repeated. Bott never made his appearance without somebody recognizing him as a dear departed friend. The glimmering light, the unwholesome excitement, ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... then, do you suppose that I will ever forgive Monsieur Hulot for the crime of having robbed me of Josepha—especially when he turned a decent girl, whom I should have married in my old age, into a good-for-nothing slut, a mountebank, an ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... graces of action, without which the choicest sentiments, clothed in the most exquisite expression, would appear unanimated and insipid; but these are as different from this ridiculous burlesque, as is the demeanour of a Tully in the rostrum, from the tricks of a Jack-pudding on a mountebank's stage. And, for the truth of what I allege, I appeal to the observation of any person who has considered the elegance of attitude and propriety of gesture, as they are universally acknowledged in the real characters of life. ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... "poet, orator and dramatist, an English Gavazzi," or, "mountebank," "humbug," or "backslider," Mr. Gough was, even at that early period, an antagonist not to be despised. He had been out of pocket and out at the elbows—indeed, his wardrobe now was mean and scanty; want and privation had been his companions, and, from his grievous ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... life of chance. He had a great deal of industry and of reserve, and great skill in everything connected with healing operations, restoring the sick to health, and in working wonders peculiar to himself. He was considered a clever mountebank and a good doctor. As may be imagined, he passed for a wizard as well—not much indeed; only a little, for it was unwholesome in those days to be considered a friend of the devil. To tell the truth, Ursus, by his passion for pharmacy and his love of plants, laid himself ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... sad breakdown. Gabriele d'Annunzio's "Forse che si forse che no" has been my undoing. I began it in the French version by Donatella Cross (Calmann-Levy, 3 fr. 50), and I began it with joy and hope. The translation, by the way, is very good. Whatever mountebank tricks d'Annunzio may play as a human being, he has undoubtedly written some very great works. He is an intensely original artist. You may sometimes think him silly, foppish, extravagant, or even caddish (as in "Il Fuoco"), but you have to admit that the English ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... medical practice is based upon knowledge, and people who are willing to order their lives in accordance with that knowledge not only recover from their illnesses, but are scarcely ever ill. The ignorant man pays $1.00 for a small bottle of colored alcohol and water which some mountebank has convinced him is a panacea for all ills. In his blindness he hopes to drink health out of that bottle. The man who knows eats moderately, drinks moderately—if at all—smokes moderately—if at all—does work for ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... that drew nearer and louder until it was, of a sudden, drowned in a cry hoarse and woeful. Then Beltane, hasting back soft-treading, stood to peer through the leaves, and presently, his cock's-comb flaunting, his silver bells a-jingle, there stepped a mountebank into the clearing—that same jester with whom Beltane had ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... an instant, her mask representing a skull, and when her sharp and clear "Sono la Morte" rang through the theatre, were just those whose disgusting habits rendered it impossible for women to pass through some of the principal streets in Venice,—just those who formed the gaping audience, when a mountebank offered a new quack medicine on the Riva dei Schiavoni. And, as fearful imagery is associated with the weakness of fever, so it seems to me that imbecility and love of terror are connected by a mysterious link throughout the whole life of man. There is a most touching instance of this in the ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... group of tramps and criminals have gathered at the end of their day's wanderings to drink the very rags from their backs and wallow in shameless incontinence. An old soldier and a quondam "daughter of the regiment," a mountebank and his tinker sweetheart, a female pickpocket whose Highland bandit lover has been hanged, a fiddler at fairs who aspires to comfort her but is outdone by a tinker, a lame ballad-singer and his three wives, one ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... worship of Esculapius. But quacks and charlatans were much in evidence, even in that remote epoch. Francis Bacon, in his "Advancement of Learning," chapter 2, says that "the poets were clear-sighted in discerning the credulity of men in often preferring a mountebank, or a cunning woman to a learned physician. Hence they made Esculapius and Circe brother and sister, and both ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... Scapin makes Geronte to crawl, then bears him off, and cudgels him as if by the hand of strangers, is altogether a most inappropriate excrescence. Boileau was therefore well warranted in reproaching Molire with having shamelessly allied Terence to Taburin, (the merry-andrew of a mountebank). In reality, Molire has here for once borrowed, not, as he frequently did, from the Italian masks, but from the Pagliasses of the rope-dancers ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... field-path towards Firgrove. Indeed, had not bargee, after their backs were turned, told their story and made known their identity to an open-mouthed and delighted audience, no one would have suspected that the two little ragamuffins in company with the outlandish-looking mountebank were the lost children whose tragic fate had cast quite a gloom over the neighbourhood, and elicited such universal sympathy with the ladies at Firgrove and the poor bereaved father fighting for his country far, far away ...
— Two Little Travellers - A Story for Girls • Frances Browne Arthur
... lest a people tired of his eloquence might prefer the sound of a new voice, and thus force on him the humiliation of surrendering his crown and his titles to another. For in their delirious enthusiasm the cities of Greece and Asia lavished money, honours, immunities, and statues, upon the mountebank orators who pleased them. Emperors saluted them as equals; the people chose them for ambassadors; until their conceit rose to such a height as almost to pass the bounds of belief. [4] And their morals, ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... bones as his blunders? is it not better to gibbet his body on a heath than his soul in an octavo? 'We know what we are, but we know not what we may be,' and it is to be hoped we never shall know, if a man who has passed through life with a sort of eclat is to find himself a mountebank on the other side of Styx, and made, like poor Joe Blackett, the laughing-stock of purgatory. The plea of publication is to provide for the child. Now, might not some of this 'sutor ultra crepidam's' friends and seducers have done a decent action without inveigling Pratt into biography? And then, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... the monarch was hiding in Boscobel Wood, the duke betook himself to London, where, donning a wizard's mask, a jack-pudding coat, a hat adorned with a fox's tail and cock's feathers, he masqueraded as a mountebank, and discoursed diverting nonsense from a stage erected at Charing Cross. After running several risks, he escaped to France. But alas for the duke, who was born as Madame Dunois avows, doubtless from experience—"for gallantry ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... circumstance which determined my distrust in him. How easily may a plan, whose contexture is most artful and refined, be spoiled in the execution by an awkward instrument. It certainly was not the Armenian's intention that the sorcerer should trumpet his fame to us in the style of a mountebank, that he should endeavor to impose upon us such fables as are too gross to bear the least reflection. For instance, with what countenance could this impostor affirm that the miraculous being he spoke of must renounce all commerce with mankind at twelve in the night? Did we not see him among ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... Chamberlainites, hustlers, bustlers, Empire-builders, and strong, silent men, really mean by "commonsense." They mean knocking, with deafening noise and dramatic effect, meaningless bits of iron into a useless bit of wood. A man goes on to an American platform and behaves like a mountebank fool with a board and a hammer; well, I do not blame him; I might even admire him. He may be a dashing and quite decent strategist. He may be a fine romantic actor, like Burke flinging the dagger on the floor. He may even (for all I know) be a sublime mystic, profoundly impressed ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... The constructive ingenuity exhibited throughout is almost morbid. Nothing could be more happily imagined, as a reductio ad absurdum of the aristocratic principle, than the adventures of Gwynplaine, the itinerant mountebank, snatched suddenly out of his little way of life, and installed without preparation as one of the hereditary legislators of a great country. It is with a very bitter irony that the paper, on which all this depends, is left to float for years at the will of wind and tide. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... booth, where, by the picture of the wooden horse, we are told, is represented "The Siege of Troy." The next paintings consist of the fall of Adam and Eve, and a scene in Punch's opera. Beneath is a mountebank, exalted on a stage, eating fire to attract the public attention; while his merry-andrew behind is distributing his medicines. Further back is a shift and hat, carried upon poles, designed as prizes for the best runner or wrestler. In front ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... this cry sprang from himself with intent to deceive me. He knew my weakness; knew the cry; he was in Darlington Manor when Cecilia died; and, wishing to startle me into dropping something which I held, made use of his ventriloquial powers (he had been a mountebank once, poor wretch!) and with such effect, that I have not been a happy man since, in spite of your daily improvement and continued promise of recovery. But I am happy now, relieved and joyful; and this miserable being,—would you like to hear his story? Are you ...
— The Woman in the Alcove • Anna Katharine Green
... mule which I had hired, and I counted in her master one hundred and twenty-one defects, all capital ones, and all enemies to the human kind. All muleteers have a touch of the ruffian, a spice of the thief, and a dash of the mountebank. If their masters, as they call those they take on their mules, be of the butter-mouthed kind, they play more pranks with them than all the rogues of this city could perform in a year. If they be strangers, the muleteers rob them; if students, they malign them; if monks, they blaspheme them; ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... at intervals, finding her naive love and humble adoration and obedience very pleasant; and, meeting her once at a peasant's fair, he jestingly yielded to the burlesque solicitations of a mountebank in a white mitre, paid a small fee, and went through an absurd ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... The son of a millionaire, like the son of a king, is seldom free from mental disease. I am just mad enough to be a mountebank. If I were a little madder, I should perhaps really believe myself Smilash instead of merely acting him. Whether you ask me to forget myself for a moment, or to remember myself for a moment, I reply that I am the son of my father, and cannot. With my egotism, ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... is this small and mystic group composed? Who are these men who in the middle of the night, in the security of a completely shuttered building, busy themselves, not with the inestimable treasures surrounding them, but with an odd and seemingly mountebank adventure totally out of keeping with the place and their absorbed demeanor? ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... rattled out puns and conundrums; yet did he contrive to infuse into all this mummery and buffoonery, into this salmagundi of the incongruous and the outre, an unmistakably tragic element,—an element of depth and strength and passion, and almost of sublimity. The mountebank became inspired. The Jack Pudding suddenly drew the cothurnus over his clogs. You were awe-stricken by the intensity, the vehemence, he threw into the mean balderdash of the burlesque-monger. These qualities were ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... the day of the races. A present, indeed! What humbug! The fact is, you didn't like to think of the poor fellow whom you had murdered. So you restored the money to the widow, publicly, of course, because you love playing to the gallery and ranting and posing, like the mountebank that you are. That was all very nicely thought out. Only, my fine fellow, you ought not to have sent me the selfsame notes that were stolen from Dugrival! Yes, you silly fool, the selfsame notes and no others! We knew the numbers, Dugrival and I did. And you were stupid enough to send the bundle ...
— The Confessions of Arsene Lupin • Maurice Leblanc
... Grange, letting himself go at last. "It's what you have been playing for all along, you infernal mountebank! But you have overreached yourself this time. For that very reason I will never give ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... made it think he was a noodle, and once when he made it think he was a statesman. It might be added that Europe was never quite just to him, and was deceived a third time, when it took him after his fall for an exploded mountebank and nonentity. Amid the general chorus of contempt which was raised over his weak and unscrupulous policy in later years, culminating in his great disaster, there are few things finer than this attempt of Browning's to give the man a platform and let him speak for himself. It is the apologia ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... proclaimed that Tcheriapin had discovered an entirely new technique, a revolutionary system of violin playing, another school was equally positive in declaring that he could not play at all, that he was a mountebank, a trickster, whose proper place was in a ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... even the leaves of the tremuloides, hanging on their compressed petioles, were scarcely seen to quiver. The rustling heard at intervals, was but the fluttering of bright wings amid the foliage; or the rushing of some mountebank squirrel in reckless evolution among the branches—sounds harmonising with the scene. Not till I had entered the glade was I aroused from my reverie—at first gently, by the sudden emergence from shade into light; but ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... literally nothing more than "clear-seeing," and it is a word which has been sorely misused, and even degraded so far as to be employed to describe the trickery of a mountebank in a variety show. Even in its more restricted sense it covers a wide range of phenomena, differing so greatly in character that it is not easy to give a definition of the word which shall be at once succinct and accurate. It ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater
... reciting and stole other men's thunder. Their social degeneracy may be traced in the dictionary. The chanter of the "gests" of kings, gesta ducum regumque, dwindled into a gesticulator, a jester: the honored jogelar of Provence, into a mountebank; the jockie, ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2 • Various
... a few hoes, flails, rakes, shovels, &c., would be very acceptable to them, when their respective uses were practically explained; and that they would prove more beneficial both to their interest and ours, than the guns, cocked hats, and mountebank coats, with which they are at present supplied." In spite of our traveller's philanthropic wish, things have not changed since his time. The negroes are just as fond of intoxicating drinks, and their petty kings still ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... heightening of the pulse realized that the real ordeal was at last at hand, for the closing of the case had wrought in the old lawyer an instant metamorphosis. With the words "The defense rests" every suggestion of the mountebank, the actor or the shyster had vanished. The awful responsibility under which he labored; the overwhelming and damning evidence against his client; the terrible consequences of the least mistake that he might make; the fact that only ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... doubt now of the superiority of our manner of treating this impertinent Cholera? Has he dared even to touch our sacred battalion?" said a magnificent mountebank-Turk, one of the standard-bearers ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... "free to write notes, and order the carriage, and play lady of the house; but did you think that made you free to bring an American mountebank of a woman to hold forth absurd trash in my mother's own drawing-room, as soon as ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... him I would not go with him, for he would not promise to leave off, and I was so terribly concerned at the apprehensions of his venturous humor that I would not so much as stir out of my lodging; but it was in vain to persuade him. He went into the market and found a mountebank there, which was what he wanted. How he picked two pockets there in one quarter of an hour, and brought to our quarters a piece of new holland of eight or nine ells, a piece of stuff, and played three or four pranks more in less ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... hurry,—put oil and something else on the child, fore and aft,—and how men and women could stand and let the stupidity take place on their children, I cannot understand. After seeing Pascal's grave, and thinking of his immortal works, it was poor preparation for the mountebank exhibition, and awkward work of making Christians, that we witnessed. You know, Charley, that I am not a lover of Romanism, but I never felt so thankful as on that day for being ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various
... himse'f, meanwhile p'intin' up to the poster which shows how the devil is holdin' Professor Pratt in his lap an' laborin' for that hypnotist's instruction; 'I shall think out a few tests which oughter get the measure of that mountebank. He won't find this outfit so easy ...
— Faro Nell and Her Friends - Wolfville Stories • Alfred Henry Lewis
... could happen, though I know that it could not, of course I should be compelled to admit that Squire Hathorne and a hundred others, who all saw this marvelous thing plainly, in open day, were deceived by the trick of an unprincipled mountebank and juggler." ...
— Dulcibel - A Tale of Old Salem • Henry Peterson
... suspicions on the good on account of the behaviour of ill men, are of the party of the latter. The common cant is no justification for taking this party. I have been deceived, say they, by Titius and Maevius; I have been the dupe of this pretender or of that mountebank; and I can trust appearances no longer. But my credulity and want of discernment cannot, as I conceive, amount to a fair presumption against any man's integrity. A conscientious person would rather doubt his own judgment, than condemn his species. ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... England in front of the house of the sheriff. Curiosity assembled a large concourse to witness what was transpiring. Scott addressed them at much length. "He jabbered away," writes a Dutch historian, "in English, like a mountebank." ...
— Peter Stuyvesant, the Last Dutch Governor of New Amsterdam • John S. C. Abbott
... to the people, whose confusions fitted them to be imposed upon by all sorts of pretenders and by every mountebank. There is no doubt but these quacking sort of fellows raised great gains out of the miserable people, for we daily found the crowds that ran after them were infinitely greater, and their doors were more thronged than those of Dr Brooks, Dr Upton, Dr Hodges, Dr Berwick, or any, though the ...
— A Journal of the Plague Year • Daniel Defoe
... at Amiens, to adjust this little disorder, and walked about the town, and into the great church, but saw nothing very remarkable there; but going across a broad street near the great church, we saw a crowd of people gazing at a mountebank doctor, who made a long harangue to them with a thousand antic postures, and gave out bills this way, and boxes of physic that way, and had a great trade, when on a sudden the people raised a cry, "Larron, ...
— Memoirs of a Cavalier • Daniel Defoe
... right-about by Lord Peter, and even ran about the streets with his band tied round his peaked beaver, bearing thereon the motto—"Nemo me impune lacessit." If his madness had only led him to make a spectacle and laughing-stock of himself, by these wild vagaries and mountebank exhibitions, all had been well, but this did not satisfy Jack; his old disposition for a riot had returned, and a riot, right or wrong, he was determined to have. So he set to work to frighten the women of the village with ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... was the last of his cloth; forced and constant jesting becoming less and less appreciated. As the jesters approached their end, they had more of the moralist and politician in them than of the mountebank. We may judge of Killegrew's wit, when we read that one day on his appearance Charles said to his gay companions, "Now we shall hear our faults." "No," replied the jester, "I don't care to trouble ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... it must be, it must; Yet your slaves view your absence from Town with disgust. For myself, I'd as soon live at Shipston-on-Stour As endure life in London without our JENOURE. Sprightly Mountebank AIDA, sweet Mistress of Arts, You smiled as you danced yourself into our hearts. And now from the Strand to the Vale of far Maida There's only one chorus—"Come back to us, AIDA!" Les absents, you know the old maxim, ont tort, Wherefore ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, August 13, 1892 • Various
... whips. I was certainly so exhausted that I could not stand without holding, while they rubbed me dry with their pocket handkerchiefs; but I soon recovered, and having put on my clothes, I mounted my favourite chesnut mare, Mountebank, and rode with my friends, who all accompanied me to the [22]Inn, the only house in the borough of Old Sarum, where this story is ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... there into the collection-boxes for the wounded, which were placed on chairs in the middle of the pathway. Then she stopped before some caricatures representing Louis Philippe as a pastry-cook, as a mountebank, as a dog, or as a leech. But she was a little frightened at the sight of Caussidiere's men with their sabres and scarfs. At other times it was a tree of Liberty that was being planted. The clergy vied with each other in blessing the Republic, escorted by servants ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... sounds. The doctor was terribly alarmed, when he discovered instincts which in his eyes were of so low an order. He understood nothing of art, nor of the noble part which artists sustain in the world. He saw in them nothing but a sort of mountebank, who amuse the world in its idle moments. Uneasy, and almost ashamed at the inclinations of his son, the father of Handel opposed them by all possible means. He would not send him to any of the public schools, because there not only grammar but the gamut would be taught him—he would not ...
— Sketch of Handel and Beethoven • Thomas Hanly Ball |
