"Mountebank" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and Harper's great 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 is a group of strollers parading the fair, ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... 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 ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... 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 with ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison
... 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... in, chemistry, philosophy, theology, and music; and he found amusement in examining gardens and collections of all sorts of virtuosities and antiquities. He had 'much discourse of chymical matters' with Sir Kenelm Digby; 'but the truth is, Sir Kenelm was an arrant mountebank.' Here, too, he wrote his second literary composition, The State of France, as it stood in the IXth yeer of this present monarch Lewis XIIII, which was published in England in 1652. Apart from these ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... 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 ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... 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
... their kinsman in the eyes of the world from 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 ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 5 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... with what she meant for a crushing rebuke, and the indignant colour rose in the cheeks of the guests; but Fergus persisted, 'But he makes a guy of himself and a mountebank.' ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... 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 ...
— The Confessions of Arsene Lupin • Maurice Leblanc
... personalities. I have been a boatman on the Nile, a leno in Rome at the time of the Punic wars, then a Greek rhetorician in Subura where I was devoured by insects. I died during the Crusade from having eaten too many grapes on the Syrian shores, I have been a pirate, monk, mountebank and coachman. Perhaps also ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... 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
... twelve which he intended then to publish. "When I had 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 ...
— Lives of John Donne, Henry Wotton, Rich'd Hooker, George Herbert, - &C, Volume Two • Izaak Walton
... 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 their ankles, who would dance on their ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge
... 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 mine!—There, ...
— My Doggie and I • R.M. Ballantyne
... 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 ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... 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 ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... first knew him. I deny the profits from the use of the 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 do this." ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... matter." Most of it is turgid, lumpy, fuzzy in texture, squalid in intellect. The rewards of the literary world—that is, the tangible, potable, spendable rewards—go mostly to the cheapjack and the mountebank. And yet here was a man who in every paragraph spoke to the keenest intellectual sense—who, ten times a page, enchanted the reader with the surprising and delicious pang given by the critically chosen word. We sat up late at night reading that book, ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... 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, ...
— Sketch of Handel and Beethoven • Thomas Hanly Ball
... 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 on ...
— Wonderful Balloon Ascents - or, the Conquest of the Skies • Fulgence Marion
... AIDA, good-bye; since 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 dance yourself ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, August 13, 1892 • Various
... Fleur to himself almost as much as he could wish. To be sure, young Mont had formed a habit of appearing on his motor-cycle almost every other day. Thank goodness, the young fellow had shaved off his half-toothbrushes, and no longer looked like a mountebank! With a girl friend of Fleur's who was staying in the house, and a neighbouring youth or so, they made two couples after dinner, in the hall, to the music of the electric pianola, which performed Fox-trots unassisted, with a surprised shine on its expressive surface. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... 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 on those who ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... still by envious malice dogged! This place of power, which now I hold, by me Unsought, was by the city's will bestowed. Yet the thrice-loyal Creon, my fast friend, Seeks now to oust me by foul practices, Using for tool this knavish soothsayer, This lying mountebank, whose greedy palm Has eyes, while in his science he is blind. Show me the proofs of thy prophetic gift. Why, when the riddling Sphinx was here, didst thou Fail by thy skill to save the commonwealth? The riddle was not such as all can read, But gave thy art ...
— Specimens of Greek Tragedy - Aeschylus and Sophocles • Goldwin Smith
... are the shame of modern gallantry, are not always equal in intelligence to the very birds whose feathers they wear in their bonnets. If by chance they happen to feel, not love nor even a caprice, but a common place desire, it is for some counter jumping mountebank, whom the crowd surrounds and applauds at public balls, and whom the papers, courtiers of all that is ridiculous, render celebrated by their puffs. Although she was obliged to live in this circle Musette had neither its manners nor its ways, she had not the servile ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... bloody battle of Worcester. Whilst 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 ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... that if any man ought to have been free from persecution it was George Whitefield, bringing great masses of the people into the kingdom of God, wearing himself out for Christ's sake: and yet the learned Dr. Johnson called him a mountebank. Robert Hall preached about the glories of heaven as no uninspired man ever preached about them, and it was said when he preached about heaven his face shone like an angel's, and yet good Christian John Foster writes of Robert Hall, saying: "Robert Hall is a mere actor, and ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... 'stiletto', 'stucco', 'studio', 'terra-cotta', 'umbrella', 'virtuoso', 'vista', 'volcano', 'zany'. 'Becco', and 'cornuto', 'fantastico', 'magnifico', 'impress' (the armorial device upon shields, and appearing constantly in its Italian form 'impresa'), 'saltimbanco' (mountebank), all once common enough, are now obsolete. Sylvester uses often 'farfalla' for butterfly, but, as far as I know, this use is peculiar to him. If these are at all the whole number of our Italian words, and I cannot call to mind ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... some think he's a spy, some guess he's a mountebank, some say one thing, some another: but, for my own part, I ...
— The Beaux-Stratagem • George Farquhar
... of seeds and flowers; and behind her ears and in her hair she had the scarlet flowers of the hibiscus. She showed the best bearing for a bride conceivable, serious and still; and I thought shame to stand up with her in that mean house and before that grinning negro. I thought shame, I say; for the mountebank was dressed with a big paper collar, the book he made believe to read from was an odd volume of a novel, and the words of his service not fit to be set down. My conscience smote me when we joined ...
— Island Nights' Entertainments • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... of elevating the funds, if he actually appeared to Lord Cochrane stripped of his great coat, and with that red coat and aid-de-camp's uniform, star and order, which have been represented to you, he appeared before him rather in the habit of a mountebank than in his proper uniform of ...
— The Trial of Charles Random de Berenger, Sir Thomas Cochrane, • William Brodie Gurney
... 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 ...
— The Standard Operas (12th edition) • George P. Upton
... 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 ...
— The Story of Versailles • Francis Loring Payne
... and chivalry an idiotic superstition: and Sir Walter Manny was 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, waiting upon his ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... 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 cracked bugle; and the elegant ladies ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... neglected at his elbow. Afterwards he found himself looking into space. There was something cynical, challenging almost, in the manner in which that man had taken Elizabeth away from him, had acknowledged his introduction, even had treated the author of a play, a writer, as some sort of a mountebank, making his living by catering for the amusements of the world. How did that man regard such gifts as his, he wondered?—Sylvanus Power, of whom he had seen it written that he was one of the conquerors of nature, a hard but splendid utilitarian, the ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... 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 mountebank was dismissed with applause and laughter. Vili vultis emere, et care vendere; in quo dicto levissimi scenici omnes tamen conscientias invenerunt suas, eique vera et tamen improvisa dicenti admirabili favore plauserunt. S. August. l. ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... see that, they will know what you are really like, Gerty—instead of buying your photograph in a shop from a collection of ballet-dancers and circus women. That is where you ought to be—in the Royal Academy: not in a shop-window with any mountebank. Oh, Gerty, do you know who is your latest rival in the stationers' windows? The woman who dresses herself as a mermaid and swims in a transparent tank, below water—Fin-fin they call her. I suppose you have not ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... 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 me ...
— The Sceptical Chymist • Robert Boyle
... 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 ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... one Pinch, a hungry lean-faced villain, A mere anatomy, a mountebank, A threadbare juggler, and a fortune-teller, A needy, hollow-eyed, sharp-looking wretch, A living-dead man. Comedy of Errors, Act v. ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... my boy," 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 latter used to go about snapping and snarling, with a broad laugh painted on his countenance; and I can assure you that, whatever may be said of the gravity of a monkey, or the melancholy of a gibed cat, there is no more melancholy creature in existence than a mountebank off duty. ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... 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 thou art. ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... 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
... 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 ...
— Punchinello, Vol.1, No. 12 , June 18,1870 • Various
... We have already seen how he was chosen, solely on that account, to be of the number of the rulers invited to go in the Ark. He had not even replied to Cosmo's invitation, but that was simply because, like everybody about him in whom he placed confidence, he regarded Cosmo Versal as a mere mountebank, and thought that there was no more danger of a flood that would cover the earth than of the fall of the moon out ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... 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
... 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 ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... "God knows! That swindler, Munn, keeps her a prisoner. Doctors long ago urged her to submit to an operation; Munn refused, and he and his deluded women have been treating her by prayer for years—the miserable mountebank!" ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... in it, a queer Eastern comedy of the mountebank who raised his eyes to a Druse princess, and wife of a Frank ship's master. It might be amusing to Fenzile to see this conqueror of men conquered by her presence, but it wasn't dignified. By God! ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... returning from a ramble in the Park, he passes by the Hall where his favourite Mountebank was to lecture on the Gospel of Soap. But not having the price of admittance that evening, and being anxious to hear the orator whom he had idolised, Khalid bravely appeals to his generosity in this quaint ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... 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
... passion, in a diatribe which beats in abomination any slang that was ever ranted out of a tub by a mountebank saint, he harps back upon the prodigious attractiveness of his mistress, in the following pathetic, though not ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... marriage, my dear sister," the Major said resolutely. "We're not going to have a Pendennis, the head of the house, marry a strolling mountebank from a booth. No, no, we won't marry into ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... people, one would imagine they could not possibly lead such an insipid life, altogether unanimated by society, or diversion. True it is, the only profane diversions of this place are a puppet-show and a mountebank; but then their religion affords a perpetual comedy. Their high masses, their feasts, their processions, their pilgrimages, confessions, images, tapers, robes, incense, benedictions, spectacles, representations, and innumerable ceremonies, which revolve almost incessantly, ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... go! 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 wrestling and cudgel-playing, foot-ball, jumping in sacks, and ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... the soloist who has not made a success as a 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 ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... the 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
... round his sister, as if they were expecting her to acquit herself of the exhibition of some peculiar faculty, some brilliant talent. Their attitude seemed to imply that she was a kind of conversational mountebank, attired, intellectually, in gauze and spangles. This attitude gave a certain ironical force to Madame Munster's next words. "Now this is your circle," she said to her uncle. "This is your salon. These are your ...
— The Europeans • Henry James
... 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 frightened face was more inviting to abuse. ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... time," said Jonah, "I appeal to you all to let that dog-eared mountebank rake over his muck-heap, and ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... 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, ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... you 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 ...
— In Direst Peril • David Christie Murray
... "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
... was, 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 ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... to his rooms and saw the 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
... out of him, for the sake of the Republican party, as well as for the sake of the sacred cause of "liberty, equality, and fraternity." But he soon saw that he was dealing with one who was a cross between a mountebank and a madman, as we learn from a letter of Madison to Jefferson, written within two months of Jefferson's first interview with Genet. "Your account of Genet," says the letter, "is dreadful. He must be brought ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... reason, 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
... 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 ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... Had Ossaroo gone mad? Or had he become suddenly afflicted with the malady of Saint Vitus? His movements were altogether of a comical nature; no mountebank could have danced about with more agility; and, but for the earnestness of his cries, evidently forced from him by fear, both Karl and Caspar would have burst out into a fit of laughter. They saw, however, that the shikarree was in some ...
— The Plant Hunters - Adventures Among the Himalaya Mountains • Mayne Reid
... though they might have been cut to pieces, they could never have been defeated or routed. I pity our children when I reflect that their tranquillity and happiness will, perhaps, depend upon such a corrupt and unprincipled people of soldiers,—easy tools in the hands of every impostor or mountebank. ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... 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 been gained from the bloody melodramas ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Mr. Bayne, just so long as it suits me." A sort of cold ferocity was growing in Blenheim's tones. "And you have yourself to thank for your position, let me remind you; you would thrust yourself in. I don't know what you are doing in the business—a ridiculous mountebank in a leather cap and coat! It's a way you Yankees have, meddling in things that don't concern you. You seem to think that you have special rights under Providence, that you own everything in the universe, even to the high seas. Well, we'll ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... 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 ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... 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, we may simply observe, that parents ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... 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
... mountebank's grin! But I'm sure she means well. And I'll agree she is the most wonderful thing in ...
— Patty and Azalea • Carolyn Wells
... 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 business ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... sportsmen's 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 frequently ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... his career with finished and studied pictures, which, I 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 ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... 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
... 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 a time? Were you driven to sup off your own dog in a ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... all familiar cases. Less so, and probably far more extensive, were the operations of those mediaeval practitioners who made dwarfs and beggar-cripples, show-monsters,—some vestiges of whose art still remain in the preliminary manipulation of the young mountebank or contortionist. Victor Hugo gives an account of them in 'L'Homme qui Rit.'—But perhaps my meaning grows plain now. You begin to see that it is a possible thing to transplant tissue from one part of an animal ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... it, and serves it up quite tender, and with a very piquante sauce. But tears, and fine feelings, and a white pocket-handkerchief, and a funeral sermon, and horses and feathers, and a procession of mutes, and a hearse with a dead donkey inside! Psha! Mountebank! I'll not give thee one penny-piece for that trick, donkey and all." That is vigorous ridicule, and not wholly undeserved; but, on the other hand, not entirely deserved. There is less of artistic trick, it seems to me, and more of natural foible, about ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... 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 ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... into the wastes of inanity. That she should have been treated so leniently and Jeanne so cruelly! say the historians. Reason good: she was nothing, came of nothing, and meant nothing. It is profane to associate Jeanne's pure and beautiful name with that of a mountebank. This is the only woman in all her generation, so far as appears to us, who was not the partisan and devoted friend of the ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... these were not confessions of the sort James desired. 'Farrago istius veteratoris' was the description applied to them by Wilson in his classical moments. 'Mountebank's stuff' he called them when writing for less classical eyes than the King's. Naunton affected to despise them as 'roaring tedious epistles.' They were as little satisfied with the undressed disclosures ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... 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 consideration; more especially, ...
— Observations on the Causes, Symptoms, and Nature of Scrofula or King's Evil, Scurvy, and Cancer • John Kent
... 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
... "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 "one of the greatest portraits of modern times," made no difference. These ...
— Outdoor Sketching - Four Talks Given before the Art Institute of Chicago; The Scammon Lectures, 1914 • Francis Hopkinson Smith
... will be dressed like a lady." She opened the book at a gaudy picture, "France, XVI(ieme) Siecle—Saltimbanque et Bohemmienne," and pointed to the female mountebank. This young person wore a bright green tunic, bordered with gold and finished off at the elbows and waist with red, over an undergown of flaring pink, the sleeves of which reached her wrist; she was crowned with red and ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... trusted," said 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, an ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... imbecility, to which the trifling of schoolmen and academicians is as nothing. It is to solve the enigma of Dante's works by imagining for him a character in which it is hard to say which predominates, the pedant, mountebank, or infidel. After that we may read Voltaire's sneers with patience, and even enter with gravity on the examination of Father Hardouin's historic doubts. The fanaticism of an outraged liberalism, produced by centuries of injustice and despotism, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... criminal offence, he had sunk into drunkenness and misery. Introduced 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 ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... and has 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
... to be named, and sometimes his 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 on, ...
— A Short View of the Frauds and Abuses Committed by Apothecaries • Christopher Merrett
... 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; ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... too much stir in the view of his wife; therefore must be laid aside; and away he goes then to a High German Doctor, who without stop or stand, according to the nature of his country, Mountebank-like begins to vaunt, as followeth: Ach Herr, ihr zijt ein hupscher, aber ein swaccher Venus-Ritter; ihr habt in des Garten der Beuchreiche Veneris gar zu viel gespatzieret, und das Jungfraulicken Roszlein ...
— The Ten Pleasures of Marriage and The Confession of the New-married Couple (1682) • A. Marsh
... of having it out with Kakunai on failure of the proof, Isuke accompanied the groom to the stable. Kakunai gingerly made up to the horse—"Kakunai has been friend to Kage. Hence he is called liar or fool or mountebank. Deign to prove his truth, Kage Dono." Respectfully he bowed to the horse. The latter at once turning to the chu[u]gen, brayed into his face—"'Tis fact. Kage is at least as human as these his brothers. ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... commanded her agitation, so far as to bid for her father's old chair, but in vain; for her timid bidding, faltered from behind a crowd, failed to catch the ear of the jocular auctioneer, (who, in Wales, must always be somewhat of a mountebank,) and the favourite chair was gone at once, after the wheel, and the many old familiar chattels which she saw standing, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... sophistry, Catherine," said Mrs. Arrowpoint. "Because you don't wish to marry a nobleman, you are not obliged to marry a mountebank or a charlatan." ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... of anonymous 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, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... 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 ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... seldom, and never was seen to smile. He had neither Servants or Baggage; But his Purse seemed well-furnished, and He did much good in the Town. Some supposed him to be an Arabian Astrologer, Others to be a Travelling Mountebank, and many declared that He was Doctor Faustus, whom the Devil had sent back to Germany. The Landlord, however told me, that He had the best reasons to believe him to be ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... the subject, and, except the parodies, I have not interfered, nor shall; indeed I did not know that Dr. Busby had published his apologetical letter and postscript [2], or I should have recalled them. But, I confess, I looked upon his conduct in a different light before its appearance. I see some mountebank has taken Alderman Birch's name [3] to vituperate the Doctor; he had much better have pilfered his pastry, which I should imagine the more valuable ingredient—at least for a Puff.—Pray secure me a copy of Woodfall's ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... me from the Academy. One of them searched through the whole of the colonnade, and every other place in which he thought that he was likely to be found, and returned home alike weary and unsuccessful; the other sat down among the audience of a mountebank close by, and, while amusing himself in the society of other slaves like a careless vagabond as he was, found Plato, without seeking for him, as he happened to pass that way. We ought," says he, "to praise that slave who, as far ...
— L. Annaeus Seneca On Benefits • Seneca
... 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. They sent for ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... again!" cried good Mr. Wilson. "I feared the woman had no better thought than to make a mountebank of ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... desirable than the adoration of any other woman. And all this helped to make a master-poet of me. Eh, why not, when such monstrous passions spoke through me—as if some implacable god elected to play godlike music on a mountebank's lute? And I made admirable plays. Why not, when there was no tragedy more poignant than mine?—and where in any comedy was any figure one-half so ludicrous as mine? Ah, yes, Fate gained ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... 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 had become a sensational ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... necessary to an historian, is well preserved by such choice language as "crusade against the institutions and people of the South,"—"fratricidal hand in sectional warfare,"—"first to arouse jealousy and hatred,"—"the South at the mercy of the North,"—"shriek for freedom,"—"political mountebank,"—"and it is to the stunted, obtuse, bigoted, fanatical, ignorant, jaundiced, self-righteous, and self-conceited millions of such in the North, that Mr. Seward, and others of his kidney, address," etc., etc.,—"British gold," (a favorite ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... 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 she terms the 'demoniacal mummery'—'the ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... to earn all the food he needed in the villages. Remembering his mountebank days, he had but to hold a little performance in the public square. Every one would hurry to see Bruin do his tricks and John himself turn somersaults and walk on his hands; after which the bear would dance and pass the hat, into which the ...
— John of the Woods • Abbie Farwell Brown
... There is a certain mixture of prophet and mountebank which can be generally counted upon to hit the popular fancy, and Daddy attained to it. Moreover, the moment was favourable. After the terrible strain of the cotton-famine and the horrors of the cholera, Manchester was prosperous again. Trade was brisk, and the passage of the ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... day, who only demand the life blood of 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 ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... 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 my head with that which all the town talks of."[57] Killegrew must have had fine scope for his ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... 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, ...
— Memoirs of a Cavalier • Daniel Defoe
... of entertainment was the Cabaret Noir, which, between the hours of 9 p.m. and 1 a.m., usually drove a roaring trade. Situated in the heart of a mountebank district, its patrons embraced all classes of society, from the American tourist with his quick eyes noting the vagaries of demi-mondaines, to the sharp-witted Parisian idler, on the alert for any easy and dishonest method ...
— The Albert Gate Mystery - Being Further Adventures of Reginald Brett, Barrister Detective • Louis Tracy
... Ague of frigid impertinences, which would make a wise man tremble to think of. Now, as for being known much by sight, and pointed at, I cannot comprehend the honour that lies in that. Whatsoever it be, every mountebank has it more than the best doctor, and the hangman more than the Lord Chief Justice of a city. Every creature has it both of nature and art if it be any ways extraordinary. It was as often said, "This is that Bucephalus," or, "This is that Incitatus," when they were led prancing through ...
— Cowley's Essays • Abraham Cowley
... skill by skill Outwitted in the battlefield of life, What spite and envy follow in your train! See, for this crown the State conferred on me. A gift, a thing I sought not, for this crown The trusty Creon, my familiar friend, Hath lain in wait to oust me and suborned This mountebank, this juggling charlatan, This tricksy beggar-priest, for gain alone Keen-eyed, but in his proper art stone-blind. Say, sirrah, hast thou ever proved thyself A prophet? When the riddling Sphinx was here Why hadst thou no deliverance for this folk? And yet the riddle was not to be solved ...
— The Oedipus Trilogy • Sophocles
... love you 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 must ...
— Household Gods • Aleister Crowley
... he fail of Success, Delusion spreads like a Plague, and the Devil is sure of Votaries; like a true Mountebank, he can always bring a Croud about his Stage, and that some ...
— The History of the Devil - As Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts • Daniel Defoe
... the 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 your ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... 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 he is fitted and in which ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... 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
... for a 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 familiar with ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... 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 ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... 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, ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... concerned with his personality!" said the bass. "I resent being associated with a man who makes a mountebank, a clown, ...
— Between You and Me • Sir Harry Lauder
... "You infamous mountebank!", said March, with great amusement at Fulkerson's access; "you call that congeries of advertising instinct of yours the human mind at its best? Come, don't be so diffident, Fulkerson. Well, I'm ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... in some way be deprived of his treasure." While spinning out this lengthy yarn, Messer Alfonso did not look at me, because we were not previously acquainted. But when that precious clay model appeared, he displayed it with such airs of ostentation, pomp, and mountebank ceremony, that, after inspecting it, I turned to Messer Alberto and said: "I am indeed lucky to have had the privilege to see it!" [2] Messer Alfonso, quite affronted, let some contemptuous words escape him, and exclaimed: "Who are you, then, you who ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... satirical intolerance. He spoke ill of Sterne and Dr. Johnson, of Fielding and Richardson, of Boswell and Goldsmith. Goldsmith he found "silly"; he was "an idiot with once or twice a fit of parts." Boswell's Tour of the Hebrides was "the story of a mountebank and his zany." Walpole felt doubly justified in disliking Johnson owing to the criticism of Gray in the Lives of the Poets. He would not even, when Johnson died, subscribe to a monument. A circular letter asking for a subscription was sent to him, signed by Burke, Boswell, ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... him a serious youth, absorbed in his profession, striving towards success, not for the sake of its rewards in luxurious living, but for the stamp that it gives to efficiency. The famous mountebank of Notre Dame did not juggle with greater fervour. Here and there a woman crosses his path, lingers a little and goes her way. Not that he is insensible to female charms, for he upbraids himself for over-susceptibility. But it seems that ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... 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 your throat, ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... upon the table the contents of the basket,—a big lump of clay, several large sheets of paper, and three or four small lumps of plaster yet damp. Standing behind this table, he presented a grotesque resemblance to those mountebank conjurers who in the public squares juggle the money of the lookers-on. His clothes had greatly suffered; he was covered with mud up to ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... hat, ascended the pulpit. Opening a sacred volume which he found there, he began to deliver an extemporaneous and coarse caricature of a monkish sermon. Some of the bystanders applauded, some cried shame, some shouted "long live the beggars!" some threw sticks and rubbish at the mountebank, some caught him by the legs and strove to pull him from the place. He, on the other hand, manfully maintained his ground, hurling back every missile, struggling with his assailants, and continuing the while to pour forth a malignant and obscene discourse. At last a young ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... 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
... then the 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 14, 1841 • Various
... seen which were covered with fancy sketches of Cheret, that represented two strong, well-built men who looked like ancient athletes. The younger of them, who was standing with his arms folded, had the vacant smile of an itinerant mountebank on his face, and the other, who was dressed in what was supposed to be the costume of a Mexican trapper, held a revolver in his hand. There were large type advertisements in all the papers, that the Montefiores ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... 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 stories, as to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... 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 judgment of all wise men, ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... Gross mountebank, by thought—I woo in thought, breathe my thought upon the balmy air and air beareth it to ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... wore a cloak of thick black furs and necklaces of black pearls, was seen standing in the market-place. Indeed, I saw him myself. There was something so strange and dreadful about the appearance of this man, although it is true that some say he was no more than a common mountebank arrayed thus to win pence, that the people set upon him. They hurled stones at him, they attacked him with swords and every other weapon, and thought that they had killed him, when suddenly he appeared outside the throng unhurt. Then ...
— Red Eve • H. Rider Haggard
... in children, and touch the spirits of the wise to solemn acquiescence, awaken him to noisier declamation. He patronises the stern laws of love and pity, hawking them like indulgences, cheapening and commanding them like the medicines of a mountebank. The censure of his critics he impudently meets by pointing to his wares: are not some of the most sacred properties of humanity—sympathy with suffering, family affection, filial devotion, and the rest—displayed upon his stall? Not thus shall he evade the charges brought against him. It ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... find dialect, as a branch of literature, worthy of the high attention and employment of the greatest master in letters—not the merest mountebank. Turn to Dickens, in innumerable passages of pathos: the death of poor Jo, or that of the "Cheap John's" little daughter in her father's arms, on the foot-board of his peddling cart before the jeering ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... 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 ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... 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 ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... 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 Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... for nobody undertook to defend the unfortunate Pons, that parasite, that curmudgeon, that skinflint, that smooth-faced humbug, on whom everybody heaped scorn; he was a viper cherished in the bosom of the family, he had not his match for spite, he was a dangerous mountebank whom nobody ought ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... honour, with the city's fool! A juggling, tooth-drawing, prating mountebank! And at a public window! where, whilst he, With his strain'd action, and his dole of faces, To his drug-lecture draws your itching ears, A crew of old, unmarried, noted letchers, Stood leering up like satyrs; and you smile Most ...
— Volpone; Or, The Fox • Ben Jonson
... 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 soberly we say that, if this be communion ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... 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 during the ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... and tattered, that they were nearly falling from his feet, and the stockings, which displayed the shape of his huge legs, were so patched and darned with worsteds of different colours, as to have made them more fitting for a mountebank than a. priest. At the present moment, there was no one likely to notice his costume; but had there been an observer there, it would have told him a tale, easy to be read, of the sufferings which had been endured by this brave and faithful ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... 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 ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... 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 of the pope ...
— Luther and the Reformation: - The Life-Springs of Our Liberties • Joseph A. Seiss
... his attentions, and gain, at least, some marks of what they might term affection: Lady Mercer, who had been the mockery of every monster shewn in drawing-rooms since her marriage, threw herself in his way, and did all but put on the dress of a mountebank, to attract his notice:—though in vain:—when she stood before him, though his eyes were apparently fixed upon her's, still it seemed as if they were unperceived;—even her unappalled impudence was baffled, and she left, the field. But though the common adultress could not influence even the guidance ...
— The Vampyre; A Tale • John William Polidori
... celebrated Mr. George Whitefield, he said, 'Whitefield never drew as much attention as a mountebank does; he did not draw attention by doing better than others, but by doing what was strange.[1247] Were Astley[1248] to preach a sermon standing upon his head on a horse's back, he would collect a multitude to hear him; ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... be up there in the clear April days, by the side of that beautiful river, and I shall be playing the mountebank here, among the London gas ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... 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. ...
— The Agony Column • Earl Derr Biggers
... 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 ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... a mountebank," growled the porter. "I am not a strolling player at the door of his booth at a fair, cracking jokes with those who pass! But perhaps it was you who said something amusing to him, just before he left? Who knows? I always took you for a grave young man. It seems ...
— Marietta - A Maid of Venice • F. Marion Crawford
... women 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 the notorious Lady Shrewsbury ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... 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 ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott |
