"Mountebank" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... coarse-minded country gentleman, or village pastor, who would have held his town glorified by the distinction of having sent forth a great judge or an eminent bishop, might disdain to cherish the personal recollections which surrounded one whom custom regarded as little above a mountebank, and the illiberal law as a vagabond. The same degrading appreciation attached both to the actor in plays and to their author. The contemptuous appellation of "play-book," served as readily to degrade the mighty volume ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... 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 ...
— The Story of Versailles • Francis Loring Payne
... will do't: And, for the purpose, I'll anoint my sword. I bought an unction of a mountebank, So mortal, that but dip a knife in it, Where it draws blood no cataplasm[45] so rare, Collected from all simples[46] that have virtue Under the moon, can save the thing from death That is but scratch'd withal: I'll touch my point With this contagion, ...
— Hamlet • William Shakespeare
... Mansel 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 poor dog Ponto, ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... writings is due to their flashes of reality. Of course the man was a poseur, a most horrid mountebank and ego-maniac. His tawdry scraps of misused idea, of literary smartness, of dog-eared and greasy reminiscence, repel us. The world of men remained for him as his audience, and he did to civilized society the continuous compliment of ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... lemonade-vender with his fantastic pagoda, slung like a peep-show across his shoulders; and the peasant woman from Normandy, with her high-crowned head-dress; and the abbe, all in black, with his shovel-hat pulled low over his eyes; and the mountebank selling pencils and lucifer-matches to the music of a hurdy-gurdy; and the gendarme, who is the terror of street urchins; and the gamin, who is the torment of the gendarme; and the water-carrier, with his cart and his ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... Supernaturalism was never more in request than since the Seeresses of Rochester commenced their levees at Barnum's Hotel. The journals have been filled with jesting and speculation upon the subject,—mountebank tricksters and shrewd professors have plied their keenest wits to discover the processes of the rappings—and Mrs. Fish and the Foxes in spite of them all preserve their secret, or at least are as successful as ever in persuading themselves and others that they ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 5, July 29, 1850 • Various
... 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 of his country, the flimsy ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... 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, a ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2 • Various
... looked less like a hell-cat than any vision of the animal I ever imagined) "wants to make out that seventy-one times seven annas and three pice is forty-nine rupees, eleven annae! Oh, you charlatan! You mountebank! You black-blooded robber! You miscreant! Cut ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... will 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 go wrong are broken up and burned in the ...
— Masters of the Guild • L. Lamprey
... 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 ...
— The Sceptical Chymist • Robert Boyle
... said Jonah, "I appeal to you all to let that dog-eared mountebank rake over his muck-heap, and ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... 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 ceremony of ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... Raymond, thoroughly roused; "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 ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... DEAR LOVE,— ... I had some fun yesterday with a class of people I detest—those who, because a man has been studious, and has written books, count that he is public property, who may be hailed by any one like a mountebank or street musician. ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... the streets a long time, began to despair of finding his missing servant. Chance, or perhaps a kind of presentiment, at last led him into the Honourable Mr. Batulcar's theatre. He certainly would not have recognised Passepartout in the eccentric mountebank's costume; but the latter, lying on his back, perceived his master in the gallery. He could not help starting, which so changed the position of his nose as to bring the "pyramid" pell-mell ...
— Around the World in 80 Days • Jules Verne
... that he carries. He is an expeditious messenger, for no man may stop him; and he can travel cheaply for whom there is free entertainment on every road. "For the belly one will play many tricks"; and Asirvadam, in financial straits, may teach dancing to nautch-girls; or he may play the mountebank or the conjurer, and with a stock of mantras and charms proceed to the curing of murrain in cattle, pip in chickens, and short-windedness in old women,—at the same time telling fortunes, calculating nativities, finding lost treasure, advising as to journeys and speculations, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... "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 experiences, he ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... 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 ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... into the Balcone and showed his nakedness,.... and abusing of scripture and as it were from thence preaching a mountebank sermon from the pulpit, saying that there he had to sell such a powder as should make all the [women] in town run after him, 1000 people standing underneath to see and hear him, and that being done ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... Crevel. "Well, 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, ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... conscience every Sabbath, unless he makes you tremble every Sabbath under the eye and the hand of God, he is no true minister to you. As Goodwin says, he is a wooden cannon. As Leighton says, he is a mountebank for a minister. ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... spieler^, straw bidder [U.S.]. imposter, pretender, soi-disant [Fr.], humbug; adventurer; Cagliostro, Fernam Mendez Pinto; ass in lion's skin &c (bungler) 701; actor &c (stage player) 599. quack, charlatan, mountebank, saltimbanco^, saltimbanque^, empiric, quacksalver, medicaster^, Rosicrucian, gypsy; man of straw. conjuror, juggler, trickster, prestidigitator, jockey; crimp, decoy, decoy duck; rogue, knave, cheat; swindler ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... after Mosca and Volpone have erected a stage upon the stage, Volpone enters, disguised as a mountebank, and abuses those 'ground ciarlatani' (charlatans, impostors) 'who come in lamely, with their mouldy tales out of Boccaccio.' Then there is a most clear allusion to Hamlet (act iv. sc. 6), where he informs his friend Horatio, ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... misinterpretations of Scripture texts, and on the poverty of the preacher's theology and scholarship generally. There is no actual disguise of the fact that Milton has the lowest opinion of the intellectual calibre of his antagonist, whom he once names "a pulpit-mountebank," and of whom he once says that "the rest of his preachment is mere groundless chat," Yet, on the other hand, he would evidently have Dr. Griffith taken as a fair enough specimen of the average Church-of-England clergyman. ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... general din came the voice of La Tour d'Azyr, who had half-risen from his seat: "Mountebank! ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... talk like a mountebank. I don't want any of your roundabout words for truth; we're not writing a Bible essay. I try my best to ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... scarcely any man, had less of reverence for the Sciences so called; for Academic culture, and the art of the Talking-Schoolmaster in general! A King obtuse to the fine Arts, especially to the vocal Arts, in a high degree. Literary fame itself he regards as mountebank fame; the art of writing big admirable folios is little better to him than that of vomiting long coils of wonderful ribbon, for the idlers of the market-place; and he bear-baits his Gundling, in this manner, as phosphorescent blockhead of the first magnitude, worthy ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... "'Mountebank!' I cried, in a rage. My anger grew cold—and I shivered, drawn perforce to the curtained window. Something was there, outside. I could not hear it, for it made no sound, but I knew it was there, watching me. What was it? The damp hair stirred on my head. ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... take more than such a wretched mountebank as he could do to frighten me, and showed him my revolver, which, until the fear was over, had escaped my memory. It pleased him, and he asked for it ...
— Oriental Encounters - Palestine and Syria, 1894-6 • Marmaduke Pickthall
... grin as well as other monkeys in cap and jerkin. You're a minstrel or a mountebank, I'll be sworn; you look for all the world as silly as a tumbler when he's been upside down and has got on his heels again. And what fool's tricks hast thou been after, Tessa?" she added, turning to her daughter, whose ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... Abbey.—The custom 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
... to their powers in a vast variety of instances, and they may be fairly considered as established in the opinion of the public. Yet, notwithstanding this success, I do not publish them as specifics; I am not vain enough to challenge the world, like a mountebank; I am aware that they do, in some constitutions, sometimes fail of effecting a cure; yet the great majority of instances in which they have succeeded after every other means had been tried, fully entitle them to superior ...
— Observations on the Causes, Symptoms, and Nature of Scrofula or King's Evil, Scurvy, and Cancer • John Kent
... perception of reality, an habitual immunity to emotional enchantment, a relentless capacity for distinguishing clearly between the appearance and the substance. The appearance, in the normal family circle, is a hero, magnifico, a demigod. The substance is a poor mountebank. ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... 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" ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... And for that purpose I'll anoint my sword. I bought an unction of a mountebank, So mortal that, but dip a knife in it, Where it draws blood no cataplasm so rare, Collected from all simples that have virtue Under the moon, can save the thing from death This is but scratch'd withal: I'll touch my point With this contagion, ...
— Hamlet, Prince of Denmark • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... quarrelled about him, as critics only quarrel about real genius, and while one school 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 ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... gentleman has asserted much, but he only emitted some effusions of the witticisms of fancy. His declamation, indeed, was better calculated for the stage of Sadler's Wells than the floor of the House of Commons. A mountebank, with but one-half of the honorable gentleman's talent for rant, would undoubtedly make his fortune. However, I am somewhat surprised he should entertain such a particular asperity against me, as I never did him a favor. But, perhaps, the honorable gentleman imagines he may talk himself ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... us, ah! who that had a friend in heaven could wish them to return in such wise as this? The very instinct of a sacred sorrow seems to forbid that our beautiful, our glorified ones should stoop lower than even to the medium of their cast-off bodies, to juggle, and rap, and squeak, and perform mountebank tricks with tables and chairs; to recite over in weary sameness harmless truisms, which we were wise enough to say for ourselves; to trifle, and banter, and jest, or to lead us through endless moonshiny mazes. Sadly and ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... sane; we're merely reasonable. We lack the human touch, the compelling enthusiastic mania. People are quite ready to listen to the philosophers for a little amusement, just as they would listen to a fiddler or a mountebank. But as to acting on the advice of the men of reason—never. Wherever the choice has had to be made between the man of reason and the madman, the world has unhesitatingly followed the madman. For the madman appeals to what is fundamental, to passion and the instincts; the philosophers ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... 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 ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... 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 of mind, who understands the phases ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... with more than his usual gloom. "He passed this way this morning, and announced that on his return he should spend the night here. We found the goodwife all of a tremble when we arrived. He is a hard man, monsieur," the mountebank continued bitterly. "She cried after him that she hoped that God would change his heart, but he only answered that even if St. Brieuc changed his body—you know the legend, monseigneur, doubtless—he ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman
... question, since no conceivable arrangement of magnets could have brought about the movements I had seen. Either I was hypnotised, and imposed upon, or else this man had discovered what had been unknown to science. His earnest and straightforward manner was not that of a mountebank. There had been no attempt to surround his work with mystery, and cloak his demonstration in unmeaning verbiage. It is true I had never heard of him in the world of science, but after all an outsider often makes a great discovery under the nose ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... grove of acacias, where the fair was going on, I lost sight of the two sisters. I went alone among the sights: there were lotteries going on, mountebank shows, places for eating and drinking, and for shooting with the cross-bow. I have always been struck by the spirit of these out-of-door festivities. In drawing-room entertainments, people are cold, grave, often ...
— An "Attic" Philosopher, Complete • Emile Souvestre
... 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. They sent for the cure. It seems that he refused ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... 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
... in the present case. It cannot be said, for instance, that you ran away from physical fear, after giving proof of such astonishing physical superiority. Your deeds this evening make the labours of Hercules dwindle to the proportions of mere mountebank's tricks." ...
— A Cigarette-Maker's Romance • F. Marion Crawford
... one night, however, to some man who mistook him, in the dim candle light, for another Solomon, a successful academic painter and R. A., he started to his feet in a rage with 'Sir, do you dare to mistake me for that mountebank?' Though not one had harkened to the feeblest caw, or been spattered by the smallest dropping from any Huxley, Tyndall, Carolus Duran, Bastien-Lepage bundle of old twigs, I began by suspecting them of lukewarmness, and even backsliding, and I owe it to that suspicion that I never became intimate ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... set aside out of his earnings enough to make him independent, and then to give up "this mountebank business," as he called it. He had a great respect for scholarly culture and personal respectability, and thought that if he could get time and health he might do something "in the genteel comedy line." He had a humorous novel in view, and a series of ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... return'd. Then fairly I bespoke the officer To go in person with me to my house. By the way we met My wife, her sister, and a rabble more Of vile confederates: along with them They brought one Pinch; a hungry lean-faced villain, A mere anatomy, a mountebank, A threadbare juggler, and a fortune-teller; A needy, hollow-ey'd, sharp-looking wretch; A living dead man; this pernicious slave, Forsooth, took on him as a conjurer; And gazing in mine eyes, feeling my pulse, And with no face, as 'twere, outfacing me, Cries out, I was possess'd: then altogether ...
— The Comedy of Errors • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... till some other tyme. I never failed to take such noates by wrighting out of his doctrine as my capacity could comprehend, unless some raynie day hindred my endeavor. My mynde never swelled with such ympossible mountebank humors as could make me affect any other kingdome ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... 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 ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... 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 ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... wearing 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 gaped at ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... 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 than ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... it imply false and extravagant claims to qualities we do not possess? Or is there the spirit of the Mountebank in it? If one were a deliberate Machiavel of dissimulation, if one fooled the people thoroughly and consciously, would one be a charlatan? Or are charlatans simply harmless fools who are too embarrassed to confess their ignorance and too childish ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... rid of these bandits in short notice," declared the mountebank emphatically. "You are just the chaps I have been ...
— The Broncho Rider Boys with Funston at Vera Cruz - Or, Upholding the Honor of the Stars and Stripes • Frank Fowler
... paper for 1792:—"This is an age of Sights and polite entertainment in the country as well as in the city.—The little town of Storrington has lately been visited by a Company of Comedians,—a Mountebank Doctor,—and a Puppet Show. One day the Doctor's Jack Pudding finding the shillings come in but slowly, exclaimed to his Master, 'Gad, Sir, it is not worth our while to stay here any longer, players have got all the gold, we all the ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... way again, 30 Year after year, a punctual visitant! There also stands a speech-maker by rote, Pulling the strings of his boxed raree-show; And in the lapse of many years may come [7] Prouder itinerant, mountebank, or he 35 Whose wonders in a covered wain lie hid. But one there is, [8] the loveliest of them all, Some sweet lass of the valley, looking out For gains, and who that sees her would not buy? Fruits of her father's orchard, are her wares, 40 And with the ruddy produce, she walks ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... mounted to the highest part of the cone, and was standing upon its apex. It was so sharp I could scarcely balance myself, but the painful stings of the insects caused me to dance upon it like a mountebank. ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... the worst of 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 ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... there will be such fine doings;—a pair of dancing bears, and three jack-an-apes dressed like soldiers, a mountebank with an Andrew and a Master Merriman, and such lots of booths with toys, and beads, and ribbons; more cakes and sweetmeats than I could eat in a year; besides a merry-go-round and two flying ships. Then, there will be ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... something like the politics of those days; with force in it, nevertheless, and something of grandeur, that will exist in spite of taste, and is born of energetic will. A man, disposed to write comparisons of characters, might, for instance, find some striking analogies between mountebank Murat, with his irresistible bravery and horsemanship, who was a kind of mixture of Dugueselin and Ducrow, and Mountebank David, a fierce, powerful painter and genius, whose idea of beauty and sublimity seemed to have ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... 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 Walpole, concerning what ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... press, denouncing him as a heresiarch, heretic, and schismatic. By Wimpina's aid he issued a reply to Luther's sermon, and also counter-theses on Luther's propositions. But the tide was turning in the sea of human thinking. Luther's utterances had turned it. The people were ready to tear the mountebank to pieces. Two years later he imploringly complained to the pope's nuncio, Miltitz, that such fury pursued him in Germany, Bohemia, Hungary, and Poland that he was nowhere safe. Even the representative ...
— Luther and the Reformation: - The Life-Springs of Our Liberties • Joseph A. Seiss
... 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 professions of disinterestedness, ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... fellow stopped a moment in his walk to lay the flat of his sword across the shoulders of a mountebank, who had dared to remain seated at the door of his booth while so great a person passed. Then he returned to his office, and whispered in the ear of his colleague the assurance that the Captain was gone again to the island of the Jews, and that his ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... 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
... was his derisive greeting. "And yet another change in you—out of sackcloth into velvet! The calendar shall know you as St. Weathercock, I think—or, perhaps, St. Mountebank." ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... will be seen that, here again, the story is admirably adapted to the moral. 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, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... all affectation as a thing of the mountebank or pantomime, and appears himself without a Jezebel's paint or a Jacob's clothing, so that you may know at once who he is, what he ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... 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 as them ...
— Faro Nell and Her Friends - Wolfville Stories • Alfred Henry Lewis
... proud prince you were promised? Rather a come down, one must admit." Lanyard laughed low, and moved nearer. "I'm sorry, I mean I might be (for myself, too) if Nogam were less a fraud than that pretentious mountebank, Prince Victor—or for the matter of that, if you were as poor of spirit as you would seem on your own valuation, if you were not at heart your mother's daughter, and mine, my child by a woman whom I loved well, and who long ago ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... "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 an altered ...
— The Rivals of Acadia - An Old Story of the New World • Harriet Vaughan Cheney
... immediately beginning to burn and smart, the afflicted quadruped began to express his sense of pain, by flinging his hinder legs, gently shaking himself, and other restless motions, which made the poor mountebank wonder what had befallen his horse; but the pain increasing, the disorderly behaviour of the steed increased proportionably, who now began to kick, prance, stand on end, neigh, immoderately shake himself, utterly disregarding both his bridle and rider, and running a tilt against ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Bampfylde Moore Carew • Unknown
... people has neither the time nor the means which are essential to the prosecution of an investigation of this kind; its conclusions are hastily formed from a superficial inspection of the more prominent features of a question. Hence it often assents to the clamor of a mountebank, who knows the secret of stimulating its tastes; while its truest friends ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... Karamazov, what sort of man is the father? I know him, but what do you make of him—a mountebank, ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... condemnation of whatever is "done for effect" obviously springs from indignation at a disclosed insincerity in the artist, who is self-convicted of having neglected truth for the sake of our applause; and we refuse our applause to the flatterer, or give it contemptuously as to a mountebank whose dexterity has ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... man distinguishes himself from the beast, seeing that no animal ever yet lost his senses through blighted love, which proves abundantly that animals have no souls. The employment of a lover is that of a mountebank, of a soldier, of a quack, of a buffoon, of a prince, of a ninny, of a king, of an idler, of a monk, of a dupe, of a blackguard, of a liar, of a braggart, of a sycophant, of a numskull, of a frivolous fool, of a blockhead, of ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... 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
... 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 ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... 'In 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, ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... 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 ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... 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
... very 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, ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... concert artist takes up teaching 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 ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... some theatrical entertainment, publicly offered a reward to any one who would produce a novel spectacle. Incited by emulation, artists arrived from all parts to contest the prize, among whom a well-known witty Mountebank gave out that he had a new kind of entertainment that had never yet been produced on any stage. This report, being spread abroad, brought the whole city together. The theater could hardly contain the number of spectators. And when ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... and bustle of the day Were o'er. The mountebank no longer wrought Miraculous cures—he and his stage were gone; And he who, when the crisis of his tale Came, and all stood breathless with hope and fear, Sent round his cap; and he who thrumm'd his wire And sang, with pleading look and plaintive strain Melting the ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... took a new 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... threw off all shame and all restraint, and the great square of the city became filled with the madness of the whole earth, be it remembered how much her sin was greater, because it was done in the face of the House of God, burning with the letters of His Law. Mountebank and masquer laughed their laugh, and went their way; and a silence has followed them, not unforetold; for amidst them all, through century after century of gathering vanity and festering guilt, that white dome of St. Mark's had uttered in the dead ear ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... interests, what you must consider is that you've no right to jeopardize the property interests of those who have put their money and their faith behind these enterprises which you control. You're already in a responsible position. You're making yourself a mountebank, a laughing-stock. No one will ever trust you in ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... in all ages, from Messalina, who waded recklessly through blood to the gratification of her passions, to that Royal mountebank, Queen Christina of Sweden, whose laughter rang out while her lover Monaldeschi was being foully done to death at her bidding by Count Sentinelli, his successor in her affections; and in this baleful company ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... very clearly in action, so that he became known to the many instead of the few, he lived what he previously wrote, and now it is generally recognized that Gabriel of the Annunciation, as he calls himself, who produced a row of obscene and histrionic novels, is a mountebank, a self-deceiver and a most affected bore. When he came to Rieka he thought fit to appeal to the England of Milton. And, like him, Milton lived as he wrote. Milton, Dante and Sophocles—to mention no others of the supreme writers—were as serious and responsible ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... the wife of John, fifth Duke of Argyll. It is from this scene and from the Stratford Jubilee fiasco that the general reader draws his picture of poor Bozzy, and the belief remains that James Boswell was a pushing and forward interloper, half mountebank and half showman. Read in the original, as a revelation of the writer's character, the very reverse is the impression; he is there presented not in any ludicrous light but rather in a good-humoured and fussy way. ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... cried the lackeys indignantly. "Dost thou imagine the king would wear anything contrived by the likes of thee. Be off, old mountebank, ere thou and thy shoes are flung into the ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... those bows he so detested! Mountebank! Never, never would he be able to stand the fellow! But he must not, would not, show it. And, as soon as he decently could, he went, taking his lonely way back through this region, of which his knowledge was almost limited to Lord's Cricket-ground, with ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... beggars of every degree been attracted by 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 of girls with strange garments fastened to ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge
... penetration of genius itself? The people has neither the time nor the means which are essential to the prosecution of an investigation of this kind: its conclusions are hastily formed from a superficial inspection of the more prominent features of a question. Hence it often assents to the clamor of a mountebank who knows the secret of stimulating its tastes, while its truest friends ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... Black and white! Mountebank!" she muttered through her clenched teeth. Then as he swung to the ground every thought fell from her but the terror he inspired. She waited, breathless, the swift racing of her heart an ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... Grey at Edinburgh, where he provoked a passage at arms with Durham. The press, and especially the Times newspaper, which had formerly loaded him with extravagant praises, now turned against him, and ridiculed him as a political mountebank. But his worst enemy was the king. William IV.'s ill-concealed impatience of whig dictation had at last been quickened into disgust by this and other sources of irritation, when the sudden death of Althorp's father, Earl Spencer, on November ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... Cocardasse. "Henri de Lagardere, a gentleman born, without a decent relative, without a decent friend, without a penny, making his livelihood as a strolling player in the booth of a mountebank." ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... 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
... but he feels, as he listens to GEORGE FRANCIS, that he is himself a marvel of taciturnity—that in the noble art of sounding his own trumpet he is a mere child—that as a contributor to the public amusement he is in danger of falling into paltry insignificance. Alas! he is not the marvellous mountebank which he has heretofore considered himself to be; and the nonsense upon which he so prided himself, in comparison with the nonsense of GEORGE FRANCIS, sinks into the most melancholy and insufferable wisdom. He looks forward to the future with a fear ...
— Punchinello, Vol.1, No. 12 , June 18,1870 • Various
... 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
... to Paris, and inquired what wine they drank there, and what learning was to be had. Everybody in Paris looked upon him with great admiration. For the people of this city are by nature so sottish, idle, and good-for-nothing, that a mountebank, a pardoner come from Rome to sell indulgences, or a fiddler in the crossways, will attract together more of them than a good preacher of the Gospel. So troublesome were they in pursuing Gargantua, that he was compelled to seek a resting-place ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VII • Various
... at the tree, however, and sprang up it like a mountebank; but the hot breath of the buffalo steamed after me as I ascended, and the concussion of his heavy skull against the trunk almost shook me ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... 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 ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... said the young lawyer. "In the first place, what did that mountebank, Colleville, ever do to get ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... proclaiming the doctrine that the State is master of all, withdraws the child from the family, as often and as completely as it can. "Democracy," said Socrates, in one of his humorous dialogues, "is a mountebank, a kidnapper of children. It snatches the child from its family while he is playing, takes him far away, allows him no more to see his family, teaches him many strange languages, drills him till his joints are supple, paints his face and dresses him in ridiculous ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... 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 ...
— The Agony Column • Earl Derr Biggers
... 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 ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... enormous, 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, it will readily be guessed, did not rise above their intellectual ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... perhaps in the whole world, but Paris is, all the same, the city for impostors and quacks to make a fortune. When their knavery is found out people turn it into a joke and laugh, but in the midst of the merriment another mountebank makes his appearance, who does something more wonderful than those who preceded him, and he makes his fortune, whilst the scoffing of the people is in abeyance. It is the unquestionable effects of the power which fashion has over that amiable, clever, ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... 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 reluctant in ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... attendance falsly fathered on him, when Mountebanks only have been employed: but to besure if an Empiric hath first been made use of, and afterwards an able Physician called in (when all opportunity of doing good was past) and the Patient dy, the Mountebank hath never been mentioned, but the Physician perhaps condemned though he hath done whatsoever could have been thought ...
— A Short View of the Frauds and Abuses Committed by Apothecaries • Christopher Merrett
... laugh, for Boniface was a mountebank of La Canardiere, famous in the city and all the ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... 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 was ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... hospital, and apprenticed to a Smithfield apothecary, his good looks, impulsive self-confidence, and unbounded talent for lying, carried him with eclat through the professions of quack doctor, juggler, and mountebank, gentleman about town, tramp, and quaker: to emerge triumphantly at last as the only son of a wealthy Anglo-Indian general, or "Bengal tiger," as his friends preferred ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat
... best of it is they are but a sort of French Huguenots, or Dutch boors, brought over in herds, but not naturalised: who have not lands of two pounds per annum in Parnassus, and therefore are not privileged to poll. Their authors are of the same level, fit to represent them on a mountebank's stage, or to be masters of the ceremonies in a bear-garden; yet these are they who have the most admirers. But it often happens, to their mortification, that as their readers improve their stock of sense, as they may by reading better books, and by conversation ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison
... my best to write her down in my mind a commonplace, vulgar, good-natured mountebank. But I can ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... Your Excellency's niece in conversation with a fiddler, a public singer, a creature little better than a mountebank! My lady Ortensia would as soon talk with a footman! Shame, my lord! The suspicion is unworthy! I would scarcely answer to the young man himself, if he spoke to me, though I am only a poor servant! A fiddler, indeed! A lute-strummer, a catgut-pincher, ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... anxiety about it. Mountebank pride never found a place in our family: we have sought for happiness, not for vain connections, and Czipra belongs to those girls whom women love even better than men. I have a good friend at home, my brother, and my dear sister-in-law will use her ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... any farther than the hair roots. He calls himself a self-made man. Well, he's not; he's self-assembled, that's all. He's made up of standardised and interchangeable parts. He's compounded of something borrowed from every political mountebank who's pulled that old bunk about being a friend of the great common people and gotten away with it during the last fifty years. He's not a real genius. ...
— The Thunders of Silence • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... carnage and rape, but it has replaced them by the monomania of business, the passion for lucre. It has done worse. It has sunk to such a state of abjectness as to be attracted by the doings of the lowest of the low. The aristocracy disguises itself as a mountebank, puts on tights and spangles, gives public trapeze performances, jumps through hoops, and does weight-lifting stunts ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... 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 into ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... will give up his pay, or his jingling sword, or even his rank; he may perhaps consent, but ask him to rip off his embroidery, and he will answer, never! How can you imagine a man of sense consenting not to look like a mountebank? ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... 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 ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner
... hitherto had only made himself notorious as a preacher, or rather as a bawling mountebank, now answered Luther with two series of theses of his own, drawn up in learned scholastic form. One Conrad Wimpina, a theologian of the university of Frankfort-on-the-Oder, whom the Archbishop Albert had recommended, ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... OUR turn, Mr. CHICOT," says Tagrag, shaking his fist at the Baron: "look to yourself, you infernal mountebank, for, by Jupiter, I'll do my best!" And before Jemmy and the rest of us, who were quite bewildered, could say a word, these two friends were charging away, spears in hand, ready to kill each other. In vain Jemmy ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... or believed himself to be, in the same mind. In a letter to Moore, dated April 9, 1814 (Letters, 1899, iii. 64), he writes, "No more rhyme for—or rather, from—me. I have taken my leave of that stage, and henceforth will mountebank it no longer." He had already—Journal, April 8 (Letters, 1898, ii. 408)—heard a rumour "that his poor little pagod, Napoleon" was "pushed off his pedestal," and before or after he began his letter to Moore he must have read an announcement in the Gazette Extraordinary (April 9, 1814—the ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... the Jacobinisim of England was confined to adventurers, and never obtained any hold on the great body of the proprietors and the people. Its spirit evaporated in tavern harangues, to which the multitude went to listen, as to the chattering and grimaces of a mountebank. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... tremble before the standard of what the reading public likes! You ask him to tame the frenzy of his inspiration, to pull your pleasure-carriages with his wingd steed! He shall be no more the seer and the prophet and the leader—he shall be mountebank and public-entertainer. ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... "A mountebank in paint, my dear sir. Think of giving him a place alongside of Sir Frederick Leighton! Impossible! Absolutely impossible!" That the Luxembourg exhibited his portrait of his mother, and that the art critics of Europe voted it ...
— Outdoor Sketching - Four Talks Given before the Art Institute of Chicago; The Scammon Lectures, 1914 • Francis Hopkinson Smith
... remember," says 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 ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... which men contrive to recruit their exhausted exchequers, I knew 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 ...
— Stories by English Authors: Scotland • Various
... is 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
... beautiful prints in Boydell's Shakespear. Lavater is to come home in a coach to-day. My father seems to think much the same of him that you did when you saw him abroad, that to some genius he adds a good deal of the mountebank. My father is going soon to Bath, Madame de Genlis is there, and he means to present the translation of Adele and Theodore to her: [Footnote: Maria Edgeworth, by her father's advice, had made a translation of Adele et Theodore in 1782, but the appearance of Holcroft's translation ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... not adopt the tricks of a mountebank to achieve leadership of the British nation, but he must contract so entire a faith in the sacred character of his mission that all the inhibiting diffidencies of his modest nature will henceforth seem to him like the whisperings ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... travelling quack, arrives at the village in great state to vend his nostrums. Nemorino applies to him for a bottle of the Elixir of Love,—with the magical properties of which he has become acquainted in a romance Adina has been reading that very morning. The mountebank, of course, has no such liquid, but he passes off on the simple peasant a bottle of wine, and assures him that if he drinks of it he can command the love of any one on the morrow. To thoroughly test its efficacy, Nemorino drinks the whole of it. When he encounters ...
— The Standard Operas (12th edition) • George P. Upton
... very rascality of their faces would at once have declared their purpose. The vulture is a filthy, unclean wretch—the bird of Mars—preying upon the eyes, the hearts, the entrails of the victims of that scoundrel-mountebank, Glory; whilst the magpie is a petty-larceny vagabond, existing upon social theft. To use a vulgar phrase—and considering the magistrates we are compelled to keep company with, 'tis wonderful that we talk so purely as we do—'twould have let the cat too much out of the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 14, 1841 • Various
... 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 ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... Laing, "that 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 go about wearing on grand occasions ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... the criminal mystery attached to that most diabolical intrigue against the fair fame of Marie Antoinette. The Count could not bear the idea of the Queen's name being coupled with those of the vile wretches, Lamotte and the mountebank Cagliostro, and therefore wished the King to chastise the Cardinal by a partial exile, which might have been removed at pleasure. But the Queen's party too fatally seconded her ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 5 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... conceivable, whether it has been handed down to us.—All the attempts that I know of to read the history of a "soul" in the Gospels seem to me to reveal only a lamentable psychological levity. M. Renan, that mountebank in psychologicus, has contributed the two most unseemly notions to this business of explaining the type of Jesus: the notion of the genius and that of the hero ("heros"). But if there is anything essentially unevangelical, it is surely the concept of ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... therefore the Anglo-Saxon version of Saint Mark's Gospel states Herodias to have vaulted or tumbled before King Herod. In Scotland these poor creatures seem, even at a late period, to have been bondswomen to their masters, as appears from a case reported by Fountainhall: 'Reid the mountebank pursues Scot of Harden and his lady for stealing away from him a little girl, called the tumbling-lassie, that dance upon his stage; and he claimed damages, and produced a contract, whereby he bought her from her mother for L30 Scots. But we have no slaves in Scotland, and mothers ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... pestilences. To-day 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 which ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... one day 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, Larron!" (in English, "Thief, ...
— Memoirs of a Cavalier • Daniel Defoe
... go on like this indefinitely," continued Bleak. "I don't mind being a mountebank, but mountebanks don't pay much interest. I'd rather be a safe deposit somewhere out of Chuff's reach. There's too much drama in ...
— In the Sweet Dry and Dry • Christopher Morley
... their victims, and if on the pleas before the court he was entitled to judgment, like them he should have had it. Doubtless in private life Shylock was a very honest and well-behaved gentleman, not a mere mountebank as he is sometimes represented on the stage, but a vigorous and energetic man of the world, shrewd, sagacious, and long sighted in business, honored on change, respected by his friends, and a pattern of prudence and morality. And then, perhaps, he was only carrying ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... 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 it to ...
— The Boy Slaves • Mayne Reid
... man 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 ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... for you live by stealing it yourselves! And you set yourselves up as judges over an honest man to tell him what he is to do with his daughter? You fool, you thing in petticoats, you deceiver of women, you charlatan, you mountebank, go! Go and perform your antics before your altars, and leave hardworking men like me to manage their families as they can, and to marry their daughters to whom ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... And Mrs Roberts had made answer that he was not like a gentleman, nor yet like a common person; if it had not been that he and his wife were such decent, quiet people, she could almost have thought he was a mountebank, or something of that kind, for they had a great box in the cart, full of she did not know what. She had helped to unpack it, and take out their linen and clothes, when the other man—his ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... banished man was most often doomed to become a hinin,—one of that wretched class of wandering pariahs who were officially termed "not-men," and lived by beggary, or by the exercise of some vulgar profession, such as that of ambulant musician or [99] mountebank. In more ancient days a banished man could have sold himself into slavery; but even this poor privilege seems to have been withdrawn ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... "Mountebank and quacksalver!" answers my passionate gentleman, "you bought your diploma from one that forges seamen's certificates in Sopar Lane. Go to, metamorphosed and two-legged ass! Where is your worship's ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... in Pope Sixtus his new Chapel, and listen to me. The first thing your painter must seek to do is to fill his wall. Let there be no mistake about this. He is at first no prophet or man of God; he is no juggler nor mountebank who shall be rewarded according to the enormity of his grins; his calling, maybe, is humbler, for all he stands for is to wash a wall so that no eye be set smarting because of it. Now that seems a very simple matter; it is just ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... choose to put it," he retorted. "I could have supposed, without your help, that you'd find some such means of justifying yourself. Your affection has nothing mercenary in it, of course. In that respect you're above suspicion. A mountebank soldier with a wooden sword to sell that nobody chooses to buy. A strolling pauper without a ...
— In Direst Peril • David Christie Murray
... hopeful of him, I find Mrs. Tenbruggen simply unendurable. A female doctor is, under any circumstances, a creature whom I detest. She is, at her very best, a bad imitation of a man. The Medical Rubber is worse than this; she is a bad imitation of a mountebank. Her grinning good-humor, adopted no doubt to please the fools who are her patients, and her impudent enjoyment of hearing herself talk, make me regret for the first time in my life that I am a young lady. If I belonged to the lowest order of the population, ...
— The Legacy of Cain • Wilkie Collins |
