"Mountebank" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Operas have lately attracted attention in Paris. Paillasse, in five acts, by MM. Dennery and Marc Fournier, produced at the Gaiete in November, was one of the greatest hits during the latter part of 1850. The character of the conventional French mountebank, Paillasse, the vagabond juggler of fairs and streets, was regarded as one of the finest creations of Frederic Lemaitre, and in one of the Christmas revues a symbol of the piece passed before the eyes of the audience as one of the types of the past year. It has since been brought out in London ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... considerations they gave no weight. It was not fair, for example, to say, as the distinguished editor of the "North American Review" did, that in professing to conduct a daily newspaper for a week as he conceived that Christ would have conducted it, Mr. Sheldon acted the part of "a notoriety seeking mountebank." It seldom is fair to go into the question of motive, for that is something upon which one has the least light, even when the motive is one's own. The motives that we think dominale us seem simple and obvious; they are in most instances exceedingly complex ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... Johns, the librarian, is very civil, and my mother went 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 ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... 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 morality. And then, perhaps, he was ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Christianity, not with mere scepticism, or casual sneer, but with set pompous merriment and farcical buffoonery. This dignitary of the church, Dean of the most conspicuous cathedral in Ireland, had, in full canonicals, made himself into a regular mountebank, for the sake of giving fuller effect, by the force of contrast, to the silliest of jests directed against all that was most inalienable from Christianity. Ridiculing such things, could he, in any just sense, be thought a Christian? ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... 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
... came 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 ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VII • Various
... Bourgogne and Madame had arm-chairs in the center of the hall. The Duchesse de Bourgogne was surprised to see a splendid theater, adorned with her arms and monogram. . . . As soon as the princess was seated, Bari, the famous mountebank of Paris, came forward and asked her protection against the doctors, and having extolled the excellence of his remedies, and the marvels of his secrets, he offered to the princess as a little diversion a comedy such as they sometimes played at Paris. There was given then a little comedy ...
— The Story of Versailles • Francis Loring Payne
... prescription; when, as he sat before the table with eyes upturned, and pen suspended over the paper, Salvator approached him on tiptoe, and drawing the pen gently through his fingers, with one of his old Coviello gesticulations in his character of the mountebank, he said, "fermati dottor mio! stop doctor, you must not lay pen to paper till I have leisure to dictate the idea and conceit of the prescription I may think proper for the malady of ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... 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 ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... himself, "Why, confound the fellow, he is not her father!" There was a sharp sting in the speech which ran into him suddenly, and put him in a worse mood. So he had National Participled the unconscious Corporal with most hearty emphasis, and had made up his mind to think no more about such a mountebank. ...
— Somebody's Luggage • Charles Dickens
... "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 ...
— The Rivals of Acadia - An Old Story of the New World • Harriet Vaughan Cheney
... "Self-opinionated old mountebank," Harleston thought, as he went down the corridor to Carpenter's office. "I shall enjoy watching Spencer make all kinds of an ass of him. 'You impressible chaps!—not dangerous to me!' Oh, Lord, the patronizing bumptiousness of the man!... Have you anything for ...
— The Cab of the Sleeping Horse • John Reed Scott
... celebrated for his aversion to water and clean linen than for any article he had ever written, declared that I was about to be banished from everything like decent society; another vowed by all the deities of his Olympus that I was a mountebank and a skeptic, who had undertaken to defend sound doctrines and to tomahawk eminent writers simply by way of bringing myself into public notice; a third painted me as a poor wretch who had come from his provincial home with his pockets filled with manuscripts, and was going about Paris begging ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... 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," ...
— Stories by English Authors: Scotland • Various
... many, and have fallen to disputing, which is the grave of all truth and all strength. I am, and always have been, artist before everything else. I know that mere politicians look on artists, with great contempt, judging them by some of those mountebank-types which are a disgrace to art. But you, my friend, you well know that a real artist is as useful as the priest and the warrior, and that when he respects what is true and what is good, he is in the right path ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... 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 ...
— Red Eve • H. Rider Haggard
... and a blackguard!" said Fontenelle fiercely, "And unless you apologise for your insult to the lady whose name you have presumed to utter with your mountebank tongue—" ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... at last brought them to understand, in a feeble way, that no harm could come to them if they faced the situation boldly. The Americans would not land on British soil; it would precipitate war with England. They would not dare to attempt a bombardment: Chase was a liar, a mountebank, a dog! After shouting himself hoarse in his frenzy of despair, he finally succeeded in forcing the men to get up steam in the company's tug. All this time, the officers of the American warship were dividing their attention between land and sea. ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... our 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 ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... of an anecdote which is related by Addison. He says that in his time there was a man who made a living by cheating the country people. He was not a Cabinet Minister,—he was only a mountebank,—and he set up a stall, and sold pills that were very good against the earthquake. Well, that is about the state of things that we are in now. There is an earthquake in Ireland. Does anybody doubt it? I will not go into the evidence of it, but I will say that there has been a most ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright
... appeared, and mouths, ears, and eyes were open; for the reception of all the wisdom and patriotism, with all the comicality and fun, which the orators were expected to bestow. A mob delights in being harangued; and is thrown into raptures by every kind of mountebank. ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... perfect, to be sure; than that of Garnerin, but still a practical machine, was described 189 years before the great aeronaut's feat at Paris. We read in the narrative of the ambassador of Louis XIV at Siam, at the end of the seventeenth century, the following passage—"A mountebank at the court of the King of Siam climbed to the top of a high bamboo-tree, and threw himself into the air without any other support than two parasols. Thus equipped, he abandoned himself to the winds, which carried him, as by ...
— Wonderful Balloon Ascents - or, the Conquest of the Skies • Fulgence Marion
... "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 opera ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... 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 gallantry and ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... had lost, he 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 ...
— The Agony Column • Earl Derr Biggers
... 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 ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... lad Mak faces to tickle the mob; He rails at our mountebank squad,— It's rivalship just ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... 'stanza', '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 any other, the Spanish in the language ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... 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 ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... scarcely an exception. This one sold his pen to the highest bidder; that one levied contributions of all sorts on the vanity of authors and artists; another was a mere actor; a fourth was nothing but a mountebank; a fifth was a mere babbler; and so on he went through the whole catalogue of authors. The illustrious literary democrats were Liberals and Spartans only for the public eye. They cared as much about liberty as about old moons: this one ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Woman, attended by her physician, who is examining an urinal. This picture is wonderfully true to nature, and each particular hair and pore of the skin is represented. In the gallery at Florence is one of his pictures, representing an interior by candle-light, with a mountebank, surrounded by a number of clowns, which is exquisitely finished. The great fame of Gerhard Douw, and the eager desire for his works, have given rise to numerous counterfeits. We may safely say that there is not an original ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner
... time been the Middle Ages, or the place a strange quarter of the Orient, I might not have been so shocked at the knowledge which a tawdry machine, or the mountebank behind it, seemed to have of the affairs of persons against whom no charge of contact with the lower strata of life could be brought. But in our civilization, where nothing but the commonplace is to be expected, I ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... a great frown and a great voice. "You should have been a mountebank and cried cures on a booth, for your wit is as nimble as an apothecary's flea. But if you have any man's blood in you, you will make such friends with master sword that hereafter we may talk to better ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... achieved anything. We're too 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 ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... hat on, a little on one side: it was a very tall hat, raked extremely, and had a narrow curling brim. His hair was all curled out in masses like an Italian mountebank—a most unpardonable fashion. He sported a huge tippeted overcoat of frieze, such as watchmen wear, only the inside was lined with costly furs, and he kept it half open to display the exquisite linen, the ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of him exposing himself to the stealthy, uneasy admiration of a women's club—he is a man of agreeable exterior, with handsome manners and an eye for this and that—than one could imagine him taking to the stump for some political mountebank or getting converted at a camp-meeting. What moves such a man to write is the obscure, inner necessity that Joseph Conrad has told us of, and what rewards him when he has done is his own searching and accurate judgment, his own pride and delight in a beautiful ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... she is most holy—but for wisdom— Say if 'tis wise to spurn all rules, all censures, And mountebank it in the public ways Till she becomes ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... I told 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 two hours; and how afterwards he robbed a doctor of physic, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... your cruelties and your crimes. You have murdered your mother. You have murdered your wife. You are an incendiary. And not content with perpetrating these enormous atrocities, you have degraded yourself in the eyes of all Rome to the level of the lowest mountebank and buffoon, so as to make yourself the object of contempt as well as abhorrence. I ...
— Nero - Makers of History Series • Jacob Abbott
... 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 ...
— Marietta - A Maid of Venice • F. Marion Crawford
... absolutely insular. There is a belt of prejudice around him, to the hardening of which centuries have come and gone. You are not, you cannot be like that," he continued with conviction. "There is truth in these things. I am not an ignorant mountebank, posing as a Messiah of science. Look at the men and women who are here to-night. They know a little. They understand a little. They are only eager to see a little further through the shadows. I do not ask you to become a convert. I ask you only to believe ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... notice of us. He was strangely a local, even a mountebank figure, but entirely local, an appurtenance of ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... a mountebank. As soon as he exhibited himself all who saw him laughed. His laugh created the laughter of others, though he did not laugh himself. It was his face only that laughed, and laughed always with an ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... 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
... five years he had not known the sensation of sobriety, having been all that time either totally drunk, or mad through the dregs of drunkenness. He on one occasion, while in this state, erected a stage on Tower Hill, and addressed the mob as a naked mountebank. Even after he became more temperate, he continued and even increased his licentiousness—one devil went out, and seven entered in. He pursued low amours in disguise; he practised occasionally as a quack doctor; ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... 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 ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... dear, we should not quite mean it—this excellent advice. We have grown accustomed to these gew-gaws, and we should miss them in spite of our knowledge of their trashiness: you, your palace and your little gold crown; I, my mountebank's cap, and the answering laugh that goes up from the crowd when I shake my bells. We want everything. All the happiness that earth and heaven are capable of bestowing. Creature comforts, and heart and soul comforts also; and, proud-spirited beings that we are, we will not be put off with a ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... 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 ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... 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 ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... them in the pillory, or throw them into the galleys, it is another affair; they give them this justice gratis. If they cut their throats, it is again gratis—always gratis. Ta-a-a-ake your tickets!" added Pique-Vinaigre, imitating a mountebank; "it is not ten sous, two sous, one you, a centime that it will cost you. No, ladies and gentlemen, it will cost you the trifle of nothing at all; it suits every one's pockets; you have only to furnish the head—the cutting and curling are at the expense of the government. ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... 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 ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge
... 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 settle ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... 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 ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... to the fair. It was still early in the evening, but the crowd had disappeared. They sauntered around among the booths, and stopped to listen to the harangue of a mountebank or to watch peasant boys shooting at figures of various kinds and a glass ball that danced on a jet of water. There was a sea of red and green lanterns; sky-rockets were hissing into the air from the rampart; musicians were playing in the cafes, while hilarious ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... them; for a denunciation sent to the headquarters in Paris by this society was like a report sent thither from an army in the field by one of the legislative spies who accompanied the generals of the Republic, and swaggered about in the camps wearing the mountebank costumes which may be studied with amusement and advantage in the museum of the Revolution established this year in the Pavillon de Flore at Paris. The members of this Societe Populaire openly pillaged the churches and convents, ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... Muttering "What she-mountebank have we here?" he sank into a chair behind the door, and fell into an absorbed revery. From this he was aroused by the cessation of the music and the hum of subdued approbation by which it was followed. Above the hum swelled the ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... character, under the term Physiognomists. I believe that such persons do so because they lack the ability and learning to comprehend Phrenology, and are unable to combat the prejudices of the ignorant. I have never seen a so-called "Physiognomist" who was not an empirical mountebank of the purest stamp, and who did not trim his sails to pander to the silly sentiment which I have just exposed. The delineations of such persons are worse than valueless, because they are pure guess-work. They pursue a shadow while they ...
— How to Become Rich - A Treatise on Phrenology, Choice of Professions and Matrimony • William Windsor
... mountebank," said Wildschloss, "or else there is only one man I know of either so foolhardy or so ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... 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 ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... stole our money, 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 ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... Off I ran. Two fellows were drawing a cart in great tribulation and fear, and the pale rascal was walking alongside, and driving them on. 'Scoundrels!' I shouted in their faces! and the word was hardly out of my throat, when the two thieves had already scampered off; but the pale skinny mountebank I held fast; the cart with the stolen goods is standing in the wood. They will soon bring it after me however; for I met a couple of workmen whom I sent for it; and the Hungarian waivode I have dragged hither ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... so that he had 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 ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... 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
... this matter the 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 a know-nothing, of a knave. An employment from which Jesus abstained, ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... representative of France and the Revolution, and naturally he meant to make the most he could 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 right if possible. His folly will ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... the outside—it doesn't strike in 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
... find it now! you are going to set up your bills, like a love-mountebank, for the speedy cure of distressed widows, old ladies, and languishing maids in the ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... "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 ...
— Outdoor Sketching - Four Talks Given before the Art Institute of Chicago; The Scammon Lectures, 1914 • Francis Hopkinson Smith
... 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 back ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... stage. They forget that it is as dangerous to praise ignorantly as to blame unjustly, and that the railer at genius, though he may seem more malevolent, will scarce appear so ridiculous to posterity as the dupe of the mountebank. Others of them are, no doubt, honest victims of that illusion of progress to which we are all more or less subject—to that ingrained belief that all evolution is upward and that the latest thing must ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... 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 ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... apologize Now that you've brought me. As I said at first, I am prepared to see a mountebank Perform his pretty tricks of eloquence To set the crowd agape. Why, once a week The Ethical Society hires one To work the same performance—quite the same Each time. Unearth a few forgotten doubts, Or dig your elbow into some new dogma, And you will see the mob fawn at your feet, Believing ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... 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. He speaks to whom he wills. Not so with Isuke and Kakunai. A word to the ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... 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
... requested her to write to him every day. Great personages, who are selfish and whimsical, are generally surrounded by parasites and buffoons, but this would not suit Lord Montfort; he sincerely detested flattery, and he wearied in eight-and-forty hours of the most successful mountebank in society. What he seemed inclined to was the society of men of science, of travellers in rare parts, and of clever artists; in short, of all persons who had what he called "idiosyncrasy." Civil engineering was then beginning to attract general ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... had returned from Germany and Gaul having played his part of mountebank upon the arena of the world. Eaten up with senseless and cynical vanity, Caius Julius Caesar Caligula desired to be the Caesar of his army as he was princeps and imperator, high pontiff and supreme dictator of the Empire. ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... 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 ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... open day 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 he took a ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... stood there, for an instant, viewing each other. But at the end of it the weakest of them was the partly sibylline, partly mountebank intruder. She swayed back against the wall. Her head rolled limply to one side, and she moaned, "O God, how tired I ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... curious tales related of the mystic henbane may be quoted one noticed by Gerarde, who says: "The root boiled with vinegar, and the same holden hot in the mouth, easeth the pain of the teeth. The seed is used by mountebank tooth-drawers, which run about the country, to cause worms to come forth of the teeth, by burning it in a chafing-dish of coles, the party holding his mouth over the fume thereof; but some crafty companions, to gain ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... heath than his soul in an octavo? 'We know what we are, but we know not what we may be,' and it is to be hoped we never shall know, if a man who has passed through life with a sort of eclat is to find himself a mountebank on the other side of Styx, and made, like poor Joe Blackett, the laughing-stock of purgatory. The plea of publication is to provide for the child. Now, might not some of this 'sutor ultra crepidam's' friends and seducers ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... up and eclipsed the EARL OF SOMERSET. This was GEORGE VILLIERS, the youngest son of a Leicestershire gentleman: who came to Court with all the Paris fashions on him, and could dance as well as the best mountebank that ever was seen. He soon danced himself into the good graces of his Sowship, and danced the other favourite out of favour. Then, it was all at once discovered that the Earl and Countess of Somerset had not deserved all those great ...
— A Child's History of England • Charles Dickens
... 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
... stranger, dark and tall, On the wooden settle next to the wall— Mountebank, pilgrim, or ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... slightly and had an opening at the root of the clitoris. The parotid region showed signs of a beard and she had hair on her upper lip. On August 20, 1864, a person came into the Hotel-Dieu, asking treatment for chronic pleurisy. He said his age was sixty-five, and he pursued the calling of a mountebank, but remarked that in early life he had been taken for a woman. He had menstruated at eight and had been examined by doctors at sixteen. The menstruation continued until 1848, and at its cessation he experienced ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... Concrete inflamable like Sulphur; concerning which I shall not now say any thing, since I can Referr You to the Diligent Observations which I remember Mr. Boyle has made concerning this Odde kind of Verdigrease. But Continues Carneades smiling, you know I was not cut out for a Mountebank, and therefore I will hasten to resume the person of a Sceptick, and take up my discourse where You diverted me from ...
— The Sceptical Chymist • Robert Boyle
... houses 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 ...
— The Albert Gate Mystery - Being Further Adventures of Reginald Brett, Barrister Detective • Louis Tracy
... or distinguished in appearance because the people notice him. He who attracts the attention of the world should inquire most carefully into the reason for the gathering of the crowd; for a crowd will gather as readily to listen to a mountebank as to hear ...
— Their Yesterdays • Harold Bell Wright
... 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. Sc. ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... dancing; and 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 ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... 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
... 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
... 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 ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... 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 related ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... a 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
... breathed his 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 ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... 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 this way ...
— In the Sweet Dry and Dry • Christopher Morley
... which, in wild groups and processions, surged back and forth. What a multitude of idlers of all ages and ranks were crowded together here to gratify their curiosity! There was laughing, grumbling, stealing, rib-poking, hurrahing, while every now and then blared the trumpet of the mountebank, who, in a red cloak and with his clown and monkey, stood on a high stand loudly boasting of his own skill, and sounding the praises of his marvelous tinctures and salves, ere he solemnly examined the glass of urine brought by some old woman, or applied himself to pull a poor peasant's ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... 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 ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... until it was, of a sudden, drowned in a cry hoarse and woeful. Then Beltane, hasting back soft-treading, stood to peer through the leaves, and presently, his cock's-comb flaunting, his silver bells a-jingle, there stepped a mountebank into the clearing—that same jester with ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... 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 actor will ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... for their good looks, and both blessed with loving natures. And it was said by the neighbors that the only flaw in the character of this good man's family was made by pretty Margaret, who went away with and married one Gosler, a travelling mountebank. This man, it is true, asserted that he was a Count in his own country, and that misfortune had brought him to what he was. His manners were, indeed, those of a gentleman; and there were people enough who believed him nothing ...
— The Von Toodleburgs - Or, The History of a Very Distinguished Family • F. Colburn Adams
... Westminster 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
... but, unless he strikes terror and pain into your 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 ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... reverend lad Maks faces to tickle the mob; He rails at our mountebank squad, Its rivalship just ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... insane 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 ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... at intervals, finding her naive love and humble adoration and obedience very pleasant; and, meeting her once at a peasant's fair, he jestingly yielded to the burlesque solicitations of a mountebank in a white mitre, paid a small fee, and went through an absurd ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... 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 tried to ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Investigator • John T. McIntyre
... 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 hero. ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... A mountebank had promised the citizens of Carthage to discover to them their most secret thoughts, in case they would come, on a day appointed, to hear him. Being all met, he told them, they were desirous to buy cheap and sell dear. ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... the 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. Were Astley to preach a sermon standing upon his head on a horse's back, he would collect a multitude to hear him; but no wise man would say he had made a better sermon for that. I never ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... "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 off to find Lindau, and when I come back I hope Mr. Dryfoos will have you under ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... of this plate is Lee 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, in order ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... of a millionaire, like the son of a king, is seldom free from mental disease. I am just mad enough to be a mountebank. If I were a little madder, I should perhaps really believe myself Smilash instead of merely acting him. Whether you ask me to forget myself for a moment, or to remember myself for a moment, I reply that I am ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... business a man has got to take his life in his hand. Precautions are pretty well useless. In nine cases out of ten the assassin—I mean the fellow who wants to be an assassin and tries to be an assassin—is a mere mountebank, who might be safely allowed to shoot at you or stab at you as long as he likes and no harm done. Why? Because the creature is nervous, and afraid to risk his own life. Get the man who wants to kill you, and does not care about his own life—is willing and ready to ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... 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, is left to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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, thief"), on the other side ...
— Memoirs of a Cavalier • Daniel Defoe
... 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 royal ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... have 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 ...
— The Ten Pleasures of Marriage and The Confession of the New-married Couple (1682) • A. Marsh
... a fellow-feeling, I should think," said Martini; "the man's a mountebank himself, if ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich
... with much interest. "So you knew him. Tell me, monsieur, was he mountebank and freebooter, or a gallant ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... or his equivalent, often before; he had "whipped" him, as he believed, controversially, again and again, at political meetings in blighted Southern towns, during the horrible period of reconstruction. If Mrs. Farrinder had looked at Verena Tarrant as if she were a mountebank, there was some excuse for it, inasmuch as the girl made much the same impression on Basil Ransom. He had never seen such an odd mixture of elements; she had the sweetest, most unworldly face, and yet, with it, an air of being on exhibition, of belonging to a troupe, of living in the gaslight, ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... belongs. Made of th' accents and best phrase of all these, He speaks one language. If strange meats displease, Art can deceive, or hunger force my taste; But pedant's motley tongue, soldier's bombast, Mountebank's drug-tongue, nor the terms of law, Are strong enough preparatives to draw Me to hear this, yet I must be content With his tongue, in his tongue call'd Compliment; In which he can win widows, and ...
— English Satires • Various
... mountebank said to me; "it is a matter of exercise and habit, that is all! Of course, one requires to be a little gifted that way and not to be butter-fingered, but what is chiefly necessary is patience and daily practice ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... professing at the outset that he was an author writing for the public, who expected from the public payment for his work, and that he preferred this course to gambling for the patronage of men in office. Having pleasantly shown the sordid spirit that underlies the mountebank's sublime professions ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... "What a mountebank art thou with thy 'Ah'! Look here, now. Does some disease of the mind or body, by contracting your muscles, bring back of a morning the wild horses that tear you in pieces at night, as with Damiens once ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... and held a great festival. Throughout civilized Europe a sort of carnival of empiricism prevailed. Quack was king. A spurious leaven of charlatanism was traceable in politics, in science, in religion—pervaded all things indeed. The world was mad to cheat or to be cheated. The mountebank enjoyed his saturnalia. Never had he exhibited his exploits before an audience so numerous and so sympathetic—so eager to be swindled, so liberal in rewarding the swindler. Gravely does Miss Hannah More address Mr. Horace ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... deemed it most prudent to drop a few sous into his cap, and effect my escape. The crowd understood the jest, and laughed heartily. One of them, however, of more decent appearance, made me a very pleasing apology, repeating at the same time a French proverb—that a pope and a mountebank were above all law. ...
— Travels through the South of France and the Interior of Provinces of Provence and Languedoc in the Years 1807 and 1808 • Lt-Col. Pinkney
... 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! ...
— The Confessions of Arsene Lupin • Maurice Leblanc
... Jonah, "I appeal to you all to let that dog-eared mountebank rake over his muck-heap, and attend ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... (our Letters tell the date) Johnson was introduced; and now I must laugh at a ridiculous Retrospection. When I was a very young wench, scarce twelve years old I trust, my notice was strongly attracted by a Mountebank in some town we were passing through. 'What a fine fellow!' said I; 'dear Papa, do ask him to dinner with us at our inn!—or, at least, Merry Andrew, because he could tell us such clever stories of his master.' My Father laughed sans intermission an hour by the dial, as Jacques once at Motley.—Yet ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... and introduce compassion, are the great effects of tragedy—great, I must confess, if they were altogether as true as they are pompous. But are habits to be introduced at three hours' warning? Are radical diseases so suddenly removed? A mountebank may promise such a cure, but a skilful physician will not undertake it. An epic poem is not in so much haste; it works leisurely: the changes which it makes are slow, but the cure is likely to be more perfect. The effects of tragedy, ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... 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 ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... 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 ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... 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
... will have patience, if so be our mirth can be restrained,—speak!—what flaw canst thou find in our Sah-luma's pearl of poesy?—what spots on the sun of his divine inspiration? As the Serpent lives, thou art an excellent mountebank and well deservest ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... were never without a crowd inside or out of their booths. Here was a quack doctor selling his infallible specifics from his cart, promising an unfailing cure for all manner of diseases. There was a mountebank conjurer seated on a table, performing all sorts of wonders before a gaping crowd. Here stood a seeming orator on a barrel, vociferating at the top of his voice, generally, however, inviting purchasers for ...
— John Deane of Nottingham - Historic Adventures by Land and Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... and how close to life, and how wholly and irresistibly comical! You must see him do the headwaiter—hear him blarney and flabbergast the complaining guest, observe him reckon up his criminal bill, see the subtle condescension of his tip grabbing. This Tich, I assure you, is no common mountebank, but a first-rate comic actor. Given legs eighteen inches longer and an equator befitting the role, he would make the best Falstaff of our generation. Even as he stands, he would do wonders with Bob Acres—and I'd give four dollars any day to see ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... 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 ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... literally nothing more than "clear-seeing," and it is a word which has been sorely misused, and even degraded so far as to be employed to describe the trickery of a mountebank in a variety show. Even in its more restricted sense it covers a wide range of phenomena, differing so greatly in character that it is not easy to give a definition of the word which shall be at once succinct and accurate. It has been called "spiritual vision," but no rendering could well ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater
... 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 ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... husband, a father—and yet in his maturer years he had so little respect for himself, his mother, wife, and daughters as to present in a dignified legislative assembly the following report on a grave question of human rights—a piece of buffoonery worthy only a mountebank in a circus: ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... fear or awe, O'erleaps at once the whole Apocrypha; Invades the Psalms with rhymes, and leaves no room For any Vandal Hopkins yet to come. But when, if, after all, this godly gear Is not so senseless as it would appear, Our mountebank has laid a deeper train; His cant, like Merry Andrew's noble vein, Cat-calls the sects to draw them in again. At leisure hours in epic song he deals, Writes to the rumbling of his coach's wheels; Prescribes ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... the last of his cloth; forced and constant jesting becoming less and less appreciated. As the jesters approached their end, they had more of the moralist and politician in them than of the mountebank. We may judge of Killegrew's wit, when we read that one day on his appearance Charles said to his gay companions, "Now we shall hear our faults." "No," replied the jester, "I don't care to trouble my head with that which all the town talks of."[57] Killegrew must have had ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... life, How are ye 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 fair opportunity, Yet ...
— Specimens of Greek Tragedy - Aeschylus and Sophocles • Goldwin Smith
... 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 |
