"Charlatan" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... somehow troubles, And so our cities receive them; Nor one of your make-believe Spanish grandees, Who ply our daughters with lies and candies, Until the poor girls believe them. No, he was no such charlatan, Count de Hoboken Flash-in-the-pan. Full of Gasconade and bravado, But a regular, rich Don Rataplan, Santa Claus de la Muscavado, Senor Grandissimo Bastinado. His was the rental of half Havana, And all Matanzas; ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... he bore without abuse The grand old name of gentleman, Defamed by every charlatan, And soiled with all ignoble use. In Memoriam, CX. ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... these essays as a member of the public, as one who has to find a right attitude towards art so that the arts may flourish again. The critic is sure to be a charlatan or a prig, unless he is to himself not a pseudo-artist expounding the mysteries of art and telling artists how to practise them, but simply one of the public with a natural and human interest in art. But one of these essays is a defence of criticism, ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... Primitif would appear to have been law-abiding and loyal gentlemen devoted to the Catholic religion, yet in their passion for new forms of Masonry and thirst for occult lore ready to associate themselves with every kind of adventurer and charlatan who might be able to initiate them into further mysteries. In the curious notes drawn up by Savalette for the guidance of the Marquis de Chefdebien we catch a glimpse of the power behind the philosophers of the salons and the aristocratic adepts of the lodges—the professional ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... feather-bed. Dvorak has honestly worked for all that has come to him, and the only people who will carp or sneer at him are those who have gained or wish to gain their positions without honest work. There could be no conjecture wider of the mark than that of his success being due to any charlatan tricks in his music or in his conduct of life. No composer's music—not Bach's, nor Haydn's, nor even Mozart's—could be a more veracious expression of his inner nature; and if Dvorak's music is at times ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... was bad enough; but when it came to Monet, words were inadequate to express sufficient contempt. A shrug of the shoulders or a pitying look, which clearly meant, "Art thou most of madman or simpleton, or, maybe, impudent charlatan who would attract attention to himself by ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... the quack treatment is always with mercury—notwithstanding denials. Sometimes serious mercurial poisoning results, and not unfrequently, through the charlatan's ignorance of proper treatment in complicated diseases, irreparable ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... is, that Mr. Coleridge has lived, as much as any man of his time, in literary and political society, and that he has sought every opportunity of keeping himself in the eye of the public, as restlessly as any charlatan who ever exhibited on the stage. To use his own words, "In 1794, when I had barely passed the verge of manhood, I published a small volume of juvenile poems." These poems, by dint of puffing, reached a third edition; and though Mr. Coleridge pretends now to ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... entertainments were most popular among the Italian nations. They represented in broad caricature national peculiarities. Their language was, originally, Oscan, as well as the characters represented. The principal one resembled the clown of modern pantomime; another was a kind of pantaloon or charlatan, and much of the rest consisted of practical jokes, like that of the Italian Polincinella. After their introduction at Rome, they received many improvements; they lost their native rusticity; their satire was good-natured; their jests were seemly, and kept in check by ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... Doctor of Natural Philosophy; Aksakof, Councilor of State to the Emperor of Russia; and Charles du Prel, Doctor of Philosophy in Munich, were in the next group, which met at Milan with intent to settle the claims of this bold charlatan. ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... late instead of early origin in Browning's poetical career, we should probably have received no such open prophecy as this. The scholar of the Renaissance, half-genius, half-charlatan, would have casuistically defended or apologised for his errors, and through the wreathing mists of sophistry would have shot forth ever and ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... a high order of excellence. We must accustom ourselves to a high standard and to a strict judgment. Sainte-Beuve relates that Napoleon one day said, when somebody was spoken of in his presence as a charlatan: "Charlatan as much as you please; but where is there not charlatanism?"—"Yes," answers Sainte-Beuve,[65] "in politics, in the art of governing mankind, that is perhaps true. But in the order of thought, ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... now I am poor, I am not trusted with the most ridiculous office, and all say, 'He's a fool! He doesn't know how to live!' The curate calls me 'philosopher' as a nickname and gives to understand that I am a charlatan who is making a show of what I learned in the higher schools, when that is exactly what benefits me the least. Perhaps I really am the fool and they ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... intended to take in order to promote the circulation of the Bible, and they have uniformly met with his approbation; therefore you will easily conceive that in what I have done there has been no rashness nor anything which savoured of the arts of the charlatan: I have too much respect for the Gospel and my own character to have recourse ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... between discreet and supercilious skepticism on one side, and, on the other, the clamorous jugglery of charlatanism. The case is not really so bad as that: nihilists are not discreet and even the Bishop of Rome is not necessarily a charlatan. Nevertheless, the outlook may fairly be described as confused and the issue uncertain. And—to come without further preface to the subject of this paper—it is with this material that the modern novelist, so far as he is a modern and not a future novelist, or a novelist temporis ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... result. So far as the public can see, one man's result is as good as another's, and thus the object is as far off as ever. We may be sure that until there is an intelligent and rational public, able to distinguish between the speculations of the charlatan and the researches of the investigator, the present state of things will continue. What we want is so wide a diffusion of scientific ideas that there shall be a class of men engaged in studying economic problems for their own sake, and an intelligent ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... and he went out of the room for a moment, I have no doubt to ask the office keeper who I was, for when he came back he was altogether a different man, both in manner and matter. All that I had thought a charlatan style had vanished, and he talked of the state of this country and the probabilities of affairs on the Continent with a good sense, and a knowledge of subjects both at home and abroad, that surprised me equally and more agreeably than the first part ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... around this wonderful wizard, and incidentally he made a great deal of money. There is little doubt that he started out as a genuine and sincere student of the scientific character of the new power he had indeed discovered; there is also no doubt that he ultimately became little more than a charlatan. There was, of course, no virtue in his "prepared" rods, nor in his magnetic tubs. At the same time the belief of the people that there was virtue in them was one of the chief means by which he was able to induce ...
— Complete Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Mind-Reading and Spiritualism • A. Alpheus
... people really find Mr. Charteris particularly attractive?" Patricia demanded, so quickly and so innocently that Mrs. Pendomer could not deny herself the glance of a charlatan who applauds his ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... in England came to an end very suddenly. It was discovered that a madrigal brought out by him was pirated from another Italian composer; whereupon Bononcini left England, humiliated to the dust, and finally died obscure and alone, the victim of a charlatan alchemist, who succeeded in obtaining ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... "Now that yon brawling charlatan," said Dellius, pointing at me with his jewelled finger, "has been rebuked, grant me leave, O Egypt, to thank thee from my ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... submitted himself to a long and severe training, at once physical, mental, and spiritual. What precisely this training had been, or where undergone, no one seemed to know,—for he never spoke of it, as, indeed, he betrayed no single other characteristic of the charlatan,—but the fact that it had involved a total disappearance from the world for five years, and that after he returned and began his singular practice no one ever dreamed of applying to him the so easily acquired epithet of quack, spoke much for the seriousness ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... grossieres, des fables si sottes, des descriptions de peuples et de contrees imaginaires si ridicules, enfin des aneries si revoltantes, qu'en verite on ne sait quel nom lui donner. Il en couteroit d'avoir a traiter de charlatan un ecrivain. Que seroit-ce donc si on avoit a la qualifier de hableur effronte? Cependant comment designer le voyageur qui nous cite des geans de trente pieds de long; des arbres dont les fruits se changent en oiseaux qu'on mange; ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, Volume 10 - Asia, Part III • Richard Hakluyt
... time had come for ending the interview. He desired that her receptive mind should retain a solemn impression of his majesty and of his power. A charlatan to the last, he now rose to his feet and with outstretched arm pointed upwards to the small glimpse ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... Mediterranean race, a dolichocephalic Iberian; he has the small melon-shaped head, the sensual features. He is leptorrhine. He comes of an intriguing, commercial, lying, and charlatan race." ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... biological law exists, so long the charlatan will keep his hold on the ignorant public. So long as it exists, the wisest practitioner will be liable to deceive himself about the effect of what he calls and loves to think are his remedies. Long-continued and sagacious observation will to some extent undeceive him; but were it ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Italian words, as 'balcony', 'baldachin', 'balustrade', 'bandit', 'bravo', 'bust' (it was 'busto' as first used in English, and therefore from the Italian, not from the French), 'cameo', 'canto', 'caricature', 'carnival', 'cartoon', 'charlatan', 'concert', 'conversazione', 'cupola', 'ditto', 'doge', 'domino'{17}, 'felucca', 'fresco', 'gazette', 'generalissimo', 'gondola', 'gonfalon', 'grotto', ('grotta' is the earliest form in which we have it in English), 'gusto', 'harlequin'{18}, ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... nothingness before you without the phrases of a charlatan. He searches a lump of gypsum, finds an impression in it, says to you, "Behold!" All at once marble takes an animal shape, the dead come to life, the history of the world is laid open before you. After countless dynasties of giant creatures, races of ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... were to show you some of the tricks of this very room," said this grizzled old foreigner with the boyish neck-tie, "you might call me a charlatan; but would that be fair? We have to make use of various means for what we consider a good end, a noble end; and there are many people who love mystery and secrecy. With you English it is different—you must ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... expert in many kinds of knowledge, we as children had something of that incomparable advantage for which I have always envied royalty. They are able to learn by the simple process of talking to people who know. That is not only the easiest road to knowledge, but if your teacher is no charlatan a more vivid impression is made upon the mind than is ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... of the day has most utterly outgrown their critical training? And that lazy wholesale disapprobation of living writers, so common and convenient, what does it do but injure all reverence for parents and teachers, when the young find out that the poet, who, as they were told, was a bungler and a charlatan, somehow continues to touch the purest and noblest nerves of their souls, and that the author who was said to be dangerous and unchristian, somehow makes them more dutiful, more earnest, more industrious, more loving to the poor? I speak of actual cases. Would to God ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... the most perfect confidence and self-possession—[49]"Messieurs, c'est impossible de tromper des gens instruits comme vous. Je vais absolument couper la tete a cet-enfant: Mais avant de commencer, il faut que je vous fasse voir que je ne suis pas un charlatan. Eh bien, en attendant et pour un espece d'exorde: Qui est entre vous qui a le mal au dent?" "Moi," exclaimed instantly a sturdy looking peasant, opening his jaws, and disclosing a row of grinders which ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... of the visitor. The place breathed out decay; the decay of humanity, of cleanliness, of the honest decencies of life turned foul. Something lethal exhaled from that dim doorway. There was a stab of pestilence, reaching for the brain. But the old charlatan ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... one very common illusion concerning General Booth. The vulgar sneers are forgotten; the scandalous slander that he was a self-seeking charlatan is now ashamed to utter itself except in vile quarters; but men still say—so anxious are they to escape from the miracle, so determined to account for every great thing by little reasons—that his success as revivalist lay only in his powers as an organiser. ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... to your devious mind," giggled Everett. "You charlatan, you've got it figured that he's one of ...
— Telempathy • Vance Simonds
... devoted servant of the Church. This evidence is surely admissible? But no: Wolsey, too, must be put out of court. Wolsey was a courtier and a timeserver. Wolsey was a tyrant's minion. Wolsey was—in short, we know not what Wolsey was—or what he was not. Who can put confidence in a charlatan? Behind the bulwarks of such objections, the champion of the abbeys may ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... seeming anomaly of a scientific age peculiarly credulous; the ease with which any charlatan finds followers; the common readiness to fall in with any theory of progress which appeals to the sympathies, and to accept the wildest notions of social reorganization. We should be obliged to note also, among scientific men themselves, a disposition to come to conclusions ...
— Quotes and Images From The Works of Charles Dudley Warner • Charles Dudley Warner
... to help the thousands beyond this little town—but I have realized that it could be no more than a dream. I have been successful here because the people believe in me and have unquestioning faith in me—to go outside amongst strangers would only have been to be received as a charlatan and faker, or as a poor deaf and ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard
... (1766-1808), one of the most eventful periods of modern Danish history. The king himself was indeed a semi-idiot, scarce responsible for his actions, yet his was the era of such striking personalities as the brilliant charlatan Struensee, the great philanthropist and reformer C. D. F. Reventlow, the ultra-conservative Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, whose mission it was to repair the damage done by Struensee, and that generation of alert and progressive ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... these traits there is a power going out from you that takes hold of people invisibly. My father told me there was a man at the court of your father who could put others to sleep by a waving of his hands. I am not comparing you to this charlatan; yet when you touch my hand a strange current runs ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... stage I learned to know Clement Blaine for a sweater of underpaid labour, a man as grossly self-indulgent as he was unprincipled, as much a charlatan as he was, in many ways, an ignoramus. Yet I see now, more clearly than then, that even Clement Blaine was not all bad. He was not even completely a charlatan. He believed he was justified in making all the money he ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... the Oracle declared, "the country needs him. If he is a charlatan, then for heaven's sake, even at the expense of all the laws that were ever framed, away with him! There is no man breathing to-day who is developing a more potent, a more wide-reaching influence upon ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... after-dinner conversation on January 11th, 1803, with Roederer, Buonaparte exalted Voltaire at the expense of Rousseau in these significant words: "The more I read Voltaire, the more I like him: he is always reasonable, never a charlatan, never a fanatic: he is made for mature minds. Up to sixteen years of age I would have fought for Rousseau against all the friends of Voltaire. Now it is the contrary. I have been especially disgusted with Rousseau since ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... very witty, and he passed in the best society of New York for a man of the world—which, indeed, he was, in a very sufficient degree. I hasten to add, to anticipate possible misconception, that he was not the least of a charlatan. He was a thoroughly honest man—honest in a degree of which he had perhaps lacked the opportunity to give the complete measure; and, putting aside the great good-nature of the circle in which he practised, which was rather fond of boasting that it possessed the "brightest" doctor in the ...
— Washington Square • Henry James
... coarse laughing and coarser wit of the banqueters. At this feast of flowers may be seen the man high in office, the grave merchant, the man entrusted with the most important affairs of the commonwealth-the sage and the charlatan. Sallow-faced and painted women, more undressed than dressed, sit beside them, hale companions. Respectable society regards the Judge a fine old gentleman; respectable society embraces Mr. Soloman, notwithstanding he carries on a business, as we shall show, that brings misery upon hundreds. ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... be seen, too, at many open spaces. Sometimes a fervid preacher would be declaiming to a pale-faced group on the subject of God's righteous judgments upon a wicked and licentious city. Sometimes a wizened old woman or a juggling charlatan would be seen selling all sorts of charms and potions as specifics against the plague. Joseph pressing near in curiosity to one of these vendors, found him doing a brisk trade in dried toads, which he vowed would preserve the wearer ...
— The Sign Of The Red Cross • Evelyn Everett-Green
... private use of this unearned distinction; there is nothing in me of the charlatan that claimed mysterious power; but my subordinates, ever in growing numbers as my promotions followed, held me in greater respect, apparently, on that very account. The natives, especially, as I mentioned, attributed semi-deific properties to my ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood
... interposed. He was a sceptic who called himself agnostic. The mystery of earth and heaven might be interpreted, but always in terms of science; yet he did not fancy the superior manner in which this charlatan flouted the supernatural. He had heard of her miracles—and doubted them. She gave a ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... charlatan believer in mesmeric influence," plied his trade in early Manhattan. He seems to have belonged to that vast army of persons who seriously believe their own teachings even when they know them to be preposterous. Perkins ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... former broker of Berlin and of Paris, now an enlightened amateur—"see, how that charlatan of a Fossati has taken care not to increase the number of trinkets now that we are in the reception-rooms. These armchairs seem to await invited guests. They are known. They have been illustrated in a ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... hands of a cunning and selfish and ruthless charlatan, is the sight that daily meets our eyes ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... sympathy. They do not contribute much to the special character of the autobiography, except in humour. The interviews with Sir Richard Phillips, in particular, give an example of Borrow's obviously personal satire, poisonous and yet without rancour. He is a type. He is the charlatan, holy and massive and not perfectly self-convincing. When Borrow's money was running low and he asked the publisher to pay for some contributions to a magazine, ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... sufficient hitherto. Not till he was already getting old, the prurient heat of his life all burnt out, and peace growing to be the chief thing this world could give him, did he start on the 'career of ambition;' and, belying all his past character and existence, set-up as a wretched empty charlatan to acquire what he could now no longer enjoy! For my share, I have no ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... managers into the Presidency, very few indeed of what might be called the better sort believed, or could easily learn, that his great qualities were great enough to compensate easily for the many things he lacked. This specially grotesque specimen of the wild West was soon seen not to be of the charlatan type; as a natural alternative he was assumed to be something of a simpleton. Many intelligent men retained this view of him throughout the years of his trial, and, only when his triumph and tragic death set going a sort ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... best what he is saying." Then turning to Messer Alberto, who was a man of great gravity and talent, I began: "This is a copy from a little silver goblet, of such and such weight, which I made at such and such a time for that charlatan Maestro Jacopo, the surgeon from Carpi. He came to Rome and spent six months there, during which he bedaubed some scores of nobleman and unfortunate gentlefolk with his dirty salves, extracting many thousands of ducats from ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... that when once reached it should have been let slip again. It seems to me an invaluable remedy for disputes: absolutely infallible. When Mr. Stuart Cumberland wrote from India to claim the plot of "The Charlatan," how simple to accord him the authorship—in India! At once we perceive a modus vivendi for the followers of Donnelly and the adherents of common-sense. In America Bacon shall be the author of ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... with self-conceit, at whom Cowper in his saner mood had laughed, but whom he now treated as a spiritual oracle, and a sort of medium of communication with the spirit-world, writing down the nonsense which the charlatan talked. Mrs. Unwin, being no longer in a condition to control the expenditure, the housekeeping, of course, went wrong; and at the same time her partner lost the protection of the love-inspired tact by which she had always contrived to shield his ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith
... know that he has resigned a brilliant and profitable practice at the bar to guide this unfortunate country out of bankruptcy and dishonour into prosperity and every promise of a great and honourable future. Pray let the matter rest there for the present. If Mr. Hamilton be really a liar and a charlatan, rest assured he will betray himself before any great harm is done. Every man is his own worst enemy. I was deeply interested in what you were saying when we entered this room. Where did you say you purchased those lily bulbs? My garden is sadly behind yours, I fear. ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... by amateur "statesmen" at Washington, Harden-Hickey was a joke. To the vacant mind of the village idiot, Rip Van Winkle returning to Falling Water also was a joke. The people of our day had not the time to understand Harden-Hickey; they thought him a charlatan, half a dangerous adventurer and half a fool; and Harden-Hickey certainly did not under stand them. His last words, addressed to his wife, showed this. They were: "I would rather die a gentleman than live a blackguard like ...
— Real Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... book, is the need of a thoroughgoing revision of our ideas; and the revision must be made by engineering minds in order that our ideas may be made to match facts. If we are ill, we consult a physician or a surgeon, not a charlatan. We must learn that, when there is trouble with the producing power of the world, we have to consult an engineer, an expert on power. Politicians, diplomats, and lawyers do not understand the problem. What I am advocating is that we must learn ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... of all, the generous and ennobling hospitality, in his city house and villas, of the millionaire rhetorician, Herodes Atticus. About Peregrinus Paulus could never make up his mind. Was he the helpful teacher Gellius thought him, or the blatant charlatan of Lucian's frequent attacks? At any rate, the stories that were abroad about his wild youth, his connection with the strange sect known as Christians, his excommunication by them for profaning one of their rites, his expulsion from Rome by the Prefect of the City for his anarchistic harangues ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... stars. Naturalism I wore round my neck, Romanticism was pinned over the heart, Symbolism I carried like a toy revolver in my waistcoat pocket, to be used on an emergency. I do not judge whether I was charlatan or genius, I merely state that I found all—actors, managers, editors, publishers, docile and ready to listen to me. The world may be wicked, cruel, and stupid, but it is patient; on this point I will not be gainsaid, it is patient; I know what I am talking about; I maintain that ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... of the Salon at Nice we read: "A portrait by Mme. Massip is a magnificent canvas, without a single stroke of the charlatan. The pose is simple and dignified; there is the serenity and repose of a woman no longer young, who makes no pretension to preserve her vanishing beauty; the costume, in black, is so managed that it would not appear superannuated nor ridiculous at any period. The execution is that of a great ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... Sludge; but the voice is the voice of Robert Browning. His first complete poem, Paracelsus, 1835, aimed to give the true inwardness of the career of the famous 16th century doctor, whose name became a synonym with charlatan. His second, Sordello, 1840, traced the struggles of an Italian poet who lived before Dante, and could not reconcile his life with his art. Paracelsus was hard, but Sordello was incomprehensible. Mr. Browning has denied that he is ever perversely crabbed or obscure. Every ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... times to solve, Napoleon I? In Napoleon, who in the sphere of action is to Modern History what Shakespeare is in the sphere of art, Tolstoi sees no more than the clerical harlequin, Abbe de Pradt, sees, a stage conqueror, a charlatan devoured by vanity, without greatness, dignity, without genius for war yet impatient of peace, shallow of intellect, tricking and tricked by all around him, dooming myriads to death for the amusement of an hour, yet on the ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... charlatan; she had strength of a sort, though where it came from who could say? Moreover, for all kinds of secret reasons of her own, she desired to keep in her grip this boy Godfrey, who had shown himself to be so wonderful a medium or clairvoyant. ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... for advertising his ideas (in doctrinis suis praedicandis venditator)[3], and the Emperor Augustus declares that he was the drum of his own fame (i.e. the blower of his own trumpet). He was in fact a mixture of scholar and charlatan, as many of his successors have been, the Houston Chamberlain ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... them in hope. Your state doctors do not so much as pretend that any good whatsoever has hitherto been derived from their operations, or that the public has prospered in any one instance under their management. The nation is sick, very sick, by their medicines. But the charlatan tells them that what is past cannot be helped;—they have taken the draught, and they must wait its operation with patience;—that the first effects, indeed, are unpleasant, but that the very sickness ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... delegates who came together in December directed the Legislature to vote a system of internal improvements "commensurate with the wants of the people," a phrase which is never lacking in the mouth of the charlatan or the demagogue. ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... Hortense and Eugene played this last piece perfectly; and I still recall that, in the role of Madame le Blanc, Hortense appeared prettier than ever in the character of an old woman, Eugene representing Le Noir, and Lauriston the charlatan. The First Consul, as I have said, confined himself to the role of spectator; but he seemed to take in these fireside plays, so to speak, the greatest pleasure, laughed and applauded heartily, ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... named Paolo Giovio, Bishop of Nocera, a charlatan and a wretched dabbler in necromancy and something of an alchemist, who has lately written the life of another Pope's son—Cesare Borgia, who lived nigh upon half a century ago, and who did more than any ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... the measure of enlightenment and of control over disease of either the medical profession of a nation or of an individual physician are the extent to which they resort to and rely upon mental influence and opium. Psychotherapy and narcotics are, and ever have been, the sheet-anchors of the charlatan and ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... of patent medicines regularly employs a person of some literary attainment whose duty it is to invent vigorous testimonials of sufferings relieved by Dr. Charlatan's universal panacea. In many instances persons are hired to give testimonials, and answer letters of inquiry in such a way as to encourage business. The shameless dishonesty and ingenious villainy ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... keep a dozen plates, balls, and knives and forks all flying about at one time in the air. The mystery is how a woman like his wife—who is certainly clever, judging from the sketches I have read, and beautiful, as I have good reason to remember—should have thrown herself away on such a charlatan. Love is blind, they say, but I never imagined it to be quite so blind ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... necessary to say that the sublime within us was instantly killed. It would be fortunate, indeed, for the afflicted, if the specific of this charlatan St. George were half as destructive to the intestinal dragons he promises to destroy. Then we turned away to the glen down which the torrent plunged. And there, at the foot of the fall, in the midst of the boiling water, the foam, and spray, rose a tall crag crowned with silver birch, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... over the crowded house. The guests flocked around the jars to taste of the wine that had been produced by occult power. The priests frowned their displeasure, and the authorities sneered and whispered "charlatan"; "fraud"; "shameful imposture"; and other expressions that always follow an ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... within the people of whom he writes, sees with their eyes, hears with their ears, though he speaks with his own lips. But one must observe that the judgment of none of his characters is a final judgment; the artist, the lover, the cynic, the charlatan, the sage, the priest—they none of them provide a solution to life; they set out on their quest, they make their guesses, they reveal their aims, but they never penetrate the inner secret. It is all inference and hope; Browning himself seems to believe in life, not because ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... managed and the county funds handled by a white politician of the "reconstructing" element then in power, which was sapping the life- blood of the south, and bonding every state within its selfish grasp by dishonest legislative acts. The poor black man was simply a tool for the white charlatan, living in a miserable log cabin, and receiving a very small share of the peculations of his white clerk. When all the enfranchised are educated, and not until then, will the great source of evil be removed from our politics which to-day endangers our ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... happened. In his chamber in the Rue St. Honore, at Paris, sat a man ALONE—a man who has been maligned, a man who has been called a knave and charlatan, a man who has been persecuted even to the death, it is said, in Roman Inquisitions, forsooth, and elsewhere. Ha! ha! A man who has a ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... haughtily as he would the interference of any insolent member of the insolent whole. It was this mixture of deep love and profound respect for the eternal PEOPLE, and of calm, passionless disdain for that capricious charlatan, the momentary PUBLIC, which made Ernest Maltravers an original and solitary thinker; and an actor, in reality modest and benevolent, in appearance arrogant and unsocial. "Pauperism, in contradistinction to poverty," he was wont to say, "is the dependence upon other ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... portrait of the author, posing theatrically, with the inscription, "To the defender of humanity, of truth, of liberty!" The salons caught the temper of the time. Voltairean as they were, disposed to set down Rousseau as an enthusiast or a charlatan, they could not resist the invasion of passion or of sensibility. It mingled with a swarm of incoherent ideas and gave them a new intensity of life. The incessant play of intellect flashed and glittered for many spirits over a moral void; the bitter, almost misanthropic temper of Chamfort's ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... upon Murray and they were eloquent with the question which she could not bring herself to ask. He longed to tell her frankly that Curtis Gordon was a charlatan, or even worse, and that his fairest schemes were doomed to failure by the very nature of his methods, ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... chief in his next station, had the sense to see that this continuous melody was the thing aimed at, and because Haydn placed counterpoint in a subsidiary condition he called him a "charlatan." Poor man, had his sense pierced a little deeper! For Haydn was—after Bach and Handel and Mozart—one of the finest masters of counterpoint who have lived. When the time came to write fugues he could write them ...
— Haydn • John F. Runciman
... of superficial pantology; a speech intended to be delivered before a defunct Mechanics' Institute. By Swallow Swift, late M.P. for the Borough of Cockney-Cloud, Witsbury: reprinted Balloon Island, Bubble year, month Ventose. Long live Charlatan!" ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... reads almost like one of Southey's or Edwin Arnold's oriental poems to peruse the account of the splendid coronation of the Afghan Emperor of All India. Retribution here, indeed, for the folly of that charlatan prime minister who once prated about a "scientific boundary" of the British Empire of India. Another instance of the "slow grinding of the mills of the gods," which is so ...
— 1931: A Glance at the Twentieth Century • Henry Hartshorne
... told him the German, for the reason that I thought more could be seen with the successful side, and that the indications pointed to the defeat of the French. My choice evidently pleased him greatly, as he had the utmost contempt for Louis Napoleon, and had always denounced him as a usurper and a charlatan. Before we separated, the President gave me the following letter to the representatives of our Government abroad, and with it I not only had no trouble in obtaining permission to go with the Germans, but was specially favored by being ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... begin with general considerations, and end with a case in point. Thus, for instance, a fragment of three pages begins: 'A compliment which is only made to gild the pill is a positive impertinence, and Monsieur Bailli is nothing but a charlatan; the monarch ought to have spit in his face, but the monarch trembled with fear.' A manuscript entitled Essai d'Egoisme, dated, 'Dux, this 27th June, 1769,' contains, in the midst of various reflections, an ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... costume-design which made her work acceptable to such an outstanding genius as Inigo Jones, she lived by guile. But I have now to invite you to see her at the feet of one of the silliest charlatans who ever lived. There is, of course, the possibility that Anne sat at the feet of this silly charlatan for what she might learn for the extension of her own technique. Or, again, it may have been that the wizard of Lambeth, whom she consulted in the Lady Essex affair, could provide a more impressive setting for spoof than she had handy, ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... the crowds are acclaiming him as the blasting and hypercritical buffoon, while he himself is seriously rallying his synthetic power, and with a grave face telling himself that it is time he had a faith to preach. His final success as a sort of charlatan coincides with his first grand ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... Heaven, you shan't be!" said Anthony, with a fierce change of tone. "You the dependent of that charlatan! I don't know how I'm to put up with it. You know very well what I think of him, and of your becoming dependent ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Whenever I raised my eyes I saw him, and wondered who he could be. Disordered people look disordered, unusual people look unusual. A youth with long hair, a velvet coat, extravagant manners, and the other effeminacies of emptiness looks the charlatan he is. Synge gave one from the first the impression of a strange personality. He was of a dark type of Irishman, though not black-haired. Something in his air gave one the fancy that his face was dark from ...
— John M. Synge: A Few Personal Recollections, with Biographical Notes • John Masefield
... works is endless, monumental; it shows us an untiring soul, an immense and indomitable will, a total ignoring of himself for the benefit of his fellow-members. This is not the conduct of the charlatan, not of the self-seeker. It is that of one of those brave and long-tried souls who have fought their way down through the vistas of time so that they might have strength to battle now for ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... the stock of Victor Hugo—a popular rhapsodist and intellectual swashbuckler, half artist and half mob orator—a man of florid and shallow certainties, violent enthusiasms, quack remedies, vast magnetism and address, and even vaster impudence—a fellow with plain touches of the charlatan. His first solid success at home was made with La Barraca in 1899—and it was a success a good deal more political than artistic; he was hailed for his frenzy far more than for his craft. Even outside of Spain his subsequent ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... were wild-eyed hangers-on telling of a flight upward on a fiery chariot, as well as a predicted disappearance and reappearance after three days. Such were the stories being gulped down by the thousands who still clung with an indefinable fascination to the memory of the charlatan. Meantime the soldier Wilkes had died of his injuries, and the coroner's inquiry was to ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... while they are really led on by the desire to secure the emoluments which have been left for their furtherance, and thus to satisfy certain coarse and brutal instincts of their own. Thus it is that we come to have so many charlatans in every branch of knowledge. The charlatan takes very different shapes according to circumstances; but at bottom he is a man who cares nothing about knowledge for its own sake, and only strives to gain the semblance of it that he may use it for his own personal ends, which are ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Studies in Pessimism • Arthur Schopenhauer
... then, to understand that he was not a conscious charlatan; he loathed mechanical tricks such as he occasionally came across; he was perfectly and serenely convinced that the powers which he possessed were genuine, and that the personages he seemed to come across in his mediumistic efforts were ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... Curiosity led him to attend the seance, having previously informed the quack that since the case was in such hands he relinquished all connection with it. On the coverlet of the bed on which the sick man lay, was spread a quantity of bones, feathers, and other trash. The charlatan went through with a series of so-called conjurations, burned feathers, hair, and tiny fragments of wood in a charcoal furnace, and mumbled gibberish past the physician's comprehension. He then proceeded to rip open the pillows and bolsters, ...
— Witchcraft and Devil Lore in the Channel Islands • John Linwood Pitts
... pointed to the schooners "rotting at their wharves," to the empty shipyards and warehouses, to the idle sailors wandering in the streets of port towns, and asked passionately how long they must be sacrificed to the theories of this charlatan in the White House. Even Southern Republicans were asking uneasily when the President would realize that the embargo was ruining planters who could not market their cotton and tobacco. And Republicans ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... the great Frederic, whose "Life" took Thomas Carlyle thirteen years in searching musty German histories to produce. Carlyle says, "One of the reasons that led me to write 'Frederic' was that he managed not to be a liar and charlatan as his century was"; and indeed his adoration for Frederic is quite pardonable. He had spent thirteen years of his life in the supreme effort of making him a hero, and his great work, contained in eight volumes, is a matchless piece of literature; but there ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... doubts—certainly not I—that the mind exercises a powerful influence over the body. From the beginning of time, the sorcerer, the interpreter of dreams, the fortune-teller, the charlatan, the quack, the wild medicine-man, the educated physician, the mesmerist, and the hypnotist have made use of the client's imagination to help them in their work. They have all recognised the potency ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... has just been forced to accept the hand of a mere charlatan, disclosed the secrets of her mind to him; it was she who incited him to an act which might have sacrificed his freedom, perhaps his life. But mankind is possessed of an innate feeling to do good; and there is a charm added when the object to be served is a fair creature about ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... rich will pay large sums to recover health when they have lost it, and for this reason the druggist deliberately selected gout as his problem. Halfway between the man of science on the one side and the charlatan on the other, he saw that the scientific method was the one road to assured success, and had studied the causes of the complaint, and based his remedy on a certain general theory of treatment, with ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... your Polish nobles, Whose presence their country somehow troubles, And so our cities receive them; Nor one of your make-believe Spanish grandees, Who ply our daughters with lies and candies, Until the poor girls believe them. No, he was no such charlatan— Count de Hoboken Flash-in-the-pan, Full of gasconade and bravado— But a regular, rich Don Rataplan, Santa Claus de la Muscovado, Senor Grandissimo Bastinado. His was the rental of half Havana And all Matanzas; ...
— Little Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor - Volume I • Various
... dokein ten apo ton huper ta hola charin to haima to heautes stazein en ekeino to poterio dia tes epikleseos autou, kai huperimeiresthai tous parontas ex ekeinou geusasthai tou pomatos, hina kai eis autous epombrese he dia tou magou toutou kleizomene charis.] Marcus was indeed a charlatan; but religious charlatanry afterwards became very earnest, and was certainly taken earnestly by many adherents of Marcus. The transubstantiation idea, in reference to the elements in the mysteries, is also plainly expressed in the Excerpt. ex. ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... the fatal charlatan-element got the upper-hand. He apostatized from his old faith in facts, took to believing in semblances; strove to connect himself with Austrian dynasties, popedoms, with the old false feudalities which he once ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... me grievously ill at Dr. Mountchance's on London Bridge. Mountchance is a quack and a charlatan, and she had me carried to her own lodgings else I must have died. I'd scarce recovered from my wound when I was arrested at Rofflash's instigation and thrown ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... with Victor Ratier on the Silhouette, under his own name and various pseudonyms. For this periodical he wrote phantasies of a festive tone and somewhat broad humour: Some Artists (signed, "An Old Artist"), The Studio, The Grocer, The Charlatan, Aquatic Customs, Physiology of the Toilet, the Cravat considered by itself and in its relations to Society and the Individual, Physiology of the Toilet and Padded Coats, Gastronomic Physiology, etc. In Le Voleur, edited by Maurice Alhoy, ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet
... W—— any authority upon any subject. I consider him a perfect specimen of a charlatan, and his opinions with regard to slavery and the abolitionists are particularly little worthy of credit in my mind, because he used America precisely as an actor would, to make money wherever he could by his lectures, which he puffed himself, till he was absolutely laughed at ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... failures, or abashed, The Court still met;—the Chairman and Directors, The Secretary, good at pen and ink, The worthy Treasurer, who kept the chink, And all the cash Collectors; With hundreds of that class, so kindly credulous, Without whose help, no charlatan alive, Or Bubble Company could hope to thrive, Or busy Chevalier, however sedulous— Those good and easy innocents in fact, Who willingly receiving chaff for corn, As pointed out by Butler's tact, Still find a secret pleasure in the act Of ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... disgusted by her behavior (for she had been introduced by him to many noblemen and gentlemen, his personal friends, some one at least of whom, on the slightest encouragement, would, he felt sure, have taken the place of the foreign charlatan she had disgraced him by preferring), consoled himself for her bad taste by entering into her possessions, which comprised a quantity of new jewellery, new lace, and feminine apparel, and an income of nearly seven thousand pounds a year. After this, he became ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... in Plato is the master of the art of illusion; the charlatan, the foreigner, the prince of esprits-faux, the hireling who is not a teacher, and who, from whatever point of view he is regarded, is the opposite of the true teacher. He is the 'evil one,' the ideal representative of all that Plato most disliked in the moral and intellectual ...
— Sophist • Plato
... feathers, which being fastened upon him, he flew off the castle wall of Stirling, but shortly he fell to the ground and brake his thigh-bone'.[1] The poet Dunbar attacked him in a satirical poem, and the reputation of a charlatan has stuck to him, but he deserves credit for his courageous attempt. So does the Marquis de Bacqueville, who, in 1742, attached to his arms and legs planes of his own design, and launched himself from an upper story of his house in Paris, in the attempt to fly across the river Seine to the ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... The mere possibility that his name should be mixed up with a racing scandal staggered him by its dangers and its absurdity. Anger against his daughter became in some measure compassion. Of course she was but a woman and a clever charlatan had entrapped her. ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... other, and, what is of more consequence, be honest with God too. A well-known agnostic lecturer once said that no god could afford to damn an honest man, and I am not sure that he was not right; but if the words of Christ were not the empty mouthings of a charlatan or a dreamer, there cannot be the slightest doubt about the fate of the hypocrite. Remember that on the only occasion on which the gentle nature of our Lord was roused to anger he denounced in the most terrible language that human ears have ever heard those whom He called hypocrites, and, ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... hours. Julien was in the mood for this final and fierce attack upon Le Jour and all the powers that stood behind it. He held up Falkenberg to derision—the charlatan of modern politics, the Puck of Berlin, whose one sincerity was his hatred for England, and one capacity, the giant capacity for mischief! He wound up his article with a scathing and personal denunciation of Falkenberg, ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... he controlled himself to ask, "And had the fellow no progressive doctrine, no steps of belief, no logical formulation of his claims? He couldn't have been merely a dunder-headed, impudent charlatan, who expected to convince by ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells
... pharmaceutical history, but of colonial dependence, cultural nationalism, industrial development, and popular psychology. It reveals how desperate man has been when faced with the terrors of disease, how he has purchased the packaged promises offered by the sincere but deluded as well as by the charlatan. It shows how science and law have combined to offer man some safeguards against deception in ...
— Old English Patent Medicines in America • George B. Griffenhagen
... view, which a French critic has lately suggested. Informing us that there are no Pecksniffs to be found in France, Mr. Taine explains this by the fact that his countrymen have ceased to affect virtue, and pretend only to vice; that a charlatan setting up morality would have no sort of following; that religion and the domestic virtues have gone so utterly to rags as not to be worth putting on for a deceitful garment; and that, no principles being left to parade, the ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... known then what I have learned from teaching Commodus and others, not even Marcus Aurelius could have persuaded me to undertake the task—medical problem though it was, and promotion though it was, and answer though it was to all the doctors who denounced me as a charlatan. I bought my fashionable practise at the cost of knowing it was I who taught young Commodus the technique of wickedness by revealing to him all its sinuosities and how, and why, ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy
... that Mohammed, from all accounts, was a demagogue, a charlatan, and a victim of mental disease. It strikes him strangely that such an individual should be chosen by Allah as his disciple on earth to make known his commands. He notes Mohammed's appearance on earth in 600 A.D. and wonders why the Creator should ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... Fontanares A charlatan, my lord? In a few days, you may be able to cut my head off; kill me, but don't calumniate me; your position in the state is too high for you to ...
— The Resources of Quinola • Honore de Balzac
... instituted an order of knighthood, and created nobility, among whom such names as Marchese Giaffori and Marchese Paoli (Pasquale's father) singularly figure. His manifesto, in answer to Genoese proclamations denouncing his pretensions and painting him as a charlatan, affected as great a sensitiveness of insult as could exist in the mind of a Capet. For some time all things went well; Theodore became master of nearly the whole island except the Genoese fortresses, which he blockaded. These were, in fact, the keys of the island. ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... coarse, and ungenerous, and thoroughly convinced that the Republican party had a monopoly of loyalty, wisdom, and virtues, and that by any means it must gain and keep control; Boutwell, fanatical and mediocre; and Benjamin Butler, a charlatan and demagogue. As a class the Western radicals were less troubled by humanitarian ideals than were those of the East and sought ...
— The Sequel of Appomattox - A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States, Volume 32 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Walter Lynwood Fleming
... inferiority. He was rarely guilty of it toward his daughter. Evidently he had resolved to back Mr. Romfrey blindly. That epistle of Dr. Shrapnel's merited condign punishment and had met with it, he seemed to rejoice in saying: and this was his abstract of the same: 'An old charlatan who tells his dupe to pray every night of his life for the beheading of kings and princes, and scattering of the clergy, and disbanding the army, that he and his rabble may fall upon the wealthy, and show us numbers win; and he'll ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... last manifestations of Hellenistic religion which probably formed the background of his philosophy. It is a strange experience, and it shows what queer stuff we humans are made of, to study these obscure congregations, drawn from the proletariate of the Levant, superstitious, charlatan-ridden, and helplessly ignorant, who still believed in Gods begetting children of mortal mothers, who took the 'Word', the 'Spirit', and the 'Divine Wisdom', to be persons called by those names, and turned the Immortality ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... that, Frederic! There was never such another impatient and inconsiderate creature upon the globe as yourself. It would be unpardonably rude in us to send the man away, if he is a charlatan, without letting him see me. Have him up, by all means, and let us hear what priggish nonsense he has to say. He will feel the ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... ,pamphlet, entitled Le Songe de M. de Maurepas, attributed to Monsieur, the king's brother,—"there was in France a certain man, clumsy, crass, heavy, born with more of rudeness than of character, more of obstinacy than of firmness, of impetuosity than of tact, a charlatan in administration as well as in virtue, made to bring the one into disrepute and the other into disgust, in other respects shy from self-conceit, timid from pride, as unfamiliar with men, whom he had never known, as with public affairs, ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... that much good may result from the employment of suggestion by a charlatan, in the form of a written medical charm, both parties being alike profoundly ignorant of ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... long possessed the ear and favor of his sovereign, lends an interest to the reign of the second Chintsong. Wanganchi did not possess the confidence or the admiration of his brother officials, and subsequent writers have generally termed him an impostor and a charlatan. But he may only have been a misguided enthusiast when he declared that "the State should take the entire management of commerce, industry, and agriculture into its own hands, with the view of succoring the working classes, and preventing their being ground to the dust by the rich." The advocacy ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... men's comprehension, or who were remarkable for any singularity of action were immediately deified. Pythagoras recognized this truth when he shrouded himself in mystery and delivered his lectures from behind a curtain, though to be sure he has come to be regarded as something of a charlatan ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... thoughts leaping to the surmise. She knew that he was, in a way, a great man—a man with a growing greatness. He had promulgated ideas so daring that his brother scientists were embarrassed to know where to place him. There were those who thought of him as a brilliant charlatan; but the convincing intelligence and self-control of his glance repudiated that idea. The Faust-like aspect of the man might lay him open to the suspicion of having too experimental and inquisitive a mind. But he had, it would seem, no need ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... one who had actually been disgraced by the infliction of stripes? [Footnote: Cp. Isaiah liii. 5.] If the Bāb had been captured in battle, bravely fighting, it might have been possible to admire him, but, as Court politicians kept on saying, he was but 'a vulgar charlatan, a timid dreamer.' [Footnote: Gobineau, p. 257.] According to Mirza Jani, it was the Crown Prince who gave the order for stripes, but his 'farrashes declared that they would rather throw themselves down from the roof of the palace than carry ...
— The Reconciliation of Races and Religions • Thomas Kelly Cheyne
... e.g. if we were called upon to point out the most disgusting abomination to be found in the whole range of contemporary literature, we have no hesitation in saying we should feel it our duty to lay our finger on the Bolingbroke-Balaam of that last and worst of an insufferable charlatan's productions."—Devereux. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 397, Saturday, November 7, 1829. • Various
... Jerusalem and been stoned by the Doctors of the Law. Of how also she had wandered back to Arabia and, being rejected by her own people as a reformer, had travelled on to Egypt, and at the court of the Pharaoh of that time met a famous magician, half charlatan and half seer who, because she was far-seeing, 'clairvoyante' we should call it, instructed her in his art so well that soon she became his master and ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard |
