"Charlatan" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... nearly one-third of the ships in the carrying trade were owned, 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 whose pockets ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... lid was engraved, "Marianna to thee—Be faithful in life and in death to ——." Here follows a name that I will not mention, but it was not unfamiliar to me. I had heard it spoken of by old men in my childhood as the name borne by a dazzling charlatan who had made a great sensation in London for a year or so, and had fled the country on the charge of a double murder within his own house—that of his mistress and his rival. I said nothing of this to Mr. J——, to whom reluctantly I ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... 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 ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... 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 spirits which surrounded the young crown prince Frederick, whose first act, on ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... audacious idolatry of some writers, and the splenetic impatience of others. M. Louis Blanc and M. Ernest Hamel talk of him as an angel or a prophet, and the Ninth Thermidor is a red day indeed in their martyrology. Michelet and M. D'Hericault treat him as a mixture of Cagliostro and Caligula, both a charlatan and a miscreant. We are reminded of the commencement of an address of the French Senate to the first Bonaparte: 'Sire,' they began, 'the desire for perfection is one of the worst maladies that can afflict ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... appeared the sturdy countenance of the scout. As quickly as he could Hawk-eye explained how he had come across a wizard preparing for a seance, how he had knocked him on the head and taken the bear's skin in which the charlatan had proposed to make ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... so lean and wan, They've seen it all before, They know they'll see the charlatan But twice ...
— Fifty Bab Ballads • William S. Gilbert
... Words.[11] General interpretation of divinities, Mueller, Muir, Bergaigne, Kaegi, Pischel-Geldner, loc. cit. The last books on the subject are Oldenberg's scholarly volume, Die Religlon des Veda (note, p. 571, above), and Phillip's The Teaching of the Vedas (1895), the work of a charlatan. ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... great is the greed of mankind that many without are in no necessity whatever, but only seek to enrich themselves at your expense. Therefore I propose you examine carefully each case that presents itself, and unless the beggar is in need of alms turn him away empty-handed, as being a fraud and a charlatan." ...
— Mother Goose in Prose • L. Frank Baum
... 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
... 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 ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... in the world would not have had so rapid and general an effect on the public mind to disabuse it of the idea that a drug is a good thing in itself, instead of being, as it is, a bad thing, as was produced by the trick (system) of this German charlatan (theorist). Not that the wiser part of the profession needed him to teach them; but the routinists and their employers, the "general practitioners," who lived by selling pills and mixtures, and their drug-consuming customers ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... other collections of the kind. The words are the words of Caliban or Mr. 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. ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... has the same origin) which they sought. But it was not long before the starved ascetic, with his wild appearance and great reputation for sanctity, inspired an awe which, in the unscrupulous, was easily turned to advantage. The Yogi became more or less of a charlatan, more or less of a juggler. Nor was this all. Yoga-practices began to take precedence before other religious practices. In the Br[a]hmanas it is the sacrifice that is god-compelling; but in the epic, although sacrifice has its place, yet when miraculous power is exerted, it is due ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... 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
... Directors in September 1836, in which he eagerly vindicates the freedom of the Calcutta Press, at a time when the writers of that Press, on the days when they were pleased to be decent, could find for him no milder appellations than those of cheat, swindler, and charlatan. ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... pictures behind him than Both left. Du Jardin's best works are in the Louvre, but there are also many of his pictures in England. Among his masterpieces, 'Cattle of all kinds in a meadow surrounded by rocks, and watered by a cascade; a horseman giving alms to a peasant boy;' and his celebrated 'Charlatan,' full of observation and humour, are in the Louvre. A fine picture, 'Figures of Animals under the shade of a Tree,' ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... 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 ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... 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 and availability of that force. Physicians cure many patients with ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... matter-of-factly. "Just like I can tell that you're getting ready to screech 'Charlatan!' at me, and like you think I got a cast-iron girdle and homely shoes. Well, they're comfortable, dearie, which is more than you can say for those high-heeled slippers of yours. That left little toe of yours is killing ...
— Card Trick • Walter Bupp AKA Randall Garrett
... of all incorrigible romanticists. Something between a prophet, a charlatan, a rhetorician, and a spoiled child, he believes in God, in democracy, in innocence, in justice, and he has a noble and unqualified devotion to human heroism and the depths of the dangerous sea. He has that arbitrary, maniacal inventive imagination which is very ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... the people as much as you do, indeed much more. They all voted for me, only a fraction of them voted for any one of you." Then that origin was the very worst that could possibly be selected, the votes of the uneducated multitude; you must have foreseen that they would give you a demagogue or a charlatan. The absence of a second Chamber, and the absence of a power of dissolution, are minor faults, but still serious ones. When the President and the Assembly differed, they were shut up together to fight ...
— Correspondence & Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859, Vol. 2 • Alexis de Tocqueville
... than those of the poet, are even less compatible with one another. The estimates and conjectures of historians also differ; some describe a pious hero and martyr, others a dissolute adventurer and charlatan. We are constrained, in the end, to construct his effigy from our own best interpretation of the things he did. Some little learning he had; just enough, probably, to disturb the balance of his judgment. ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... free rein to his irritation. "What is he? A charlatan? A visionary? A magician? Is he in partnership with some unclean power? What do you think of it? Or is it the devil himself come in a human shape—a ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... Lydia, lived in Rome in the reign of Nero, and dedicated one of his books to the Emperor. He was a charlatan with no medical knowledge, but with a good deal of ability and assurance. He said that medicine surpassed all other arts, and he surpassed all other physicians. His father had been a weaver, and in his youth Thessalus followed the same calling, and ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... you a man of science or have you the brain of a charlatan enclosed in the fleshy envelope of a conjurer and a sinner? Do you study the noble and beautiful stars for their own sakes to find out what they are, and what they are doing, what is their nature and what their place ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... Prophethood; and has come down to us inextricably involved in error to this day; dragging along with it such a coil of fables, impurities, intolerances, as makes it a questionable step for me here and now to say, as I have done, that Mahomet was a true Speaker at all, and not rather an ambitious charlatan, perversity, and simulacrum, no Speaker, but a Babbler! Even in Arabia, as I compute, Mahomet will have exhausted himself and become obsolete, while this Shakespeare, this Dante may still be young;—while this Shakespeare may still pretend to be a Priest of Mankind, of Arabia ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... 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 ...
— The Reconciliation of Races and Religions • Thomas Kelly Cheyne
... he was ready to treat with Trolle. After standing some time in the midst of a pouring rain, and without any prospect of an answer, the regent grew impatient, and sent word to Trolle that he could offer no other terms than those already offered. The charlatan then threw off the mask. He replied that he placed implicit confidence in Christiern, and was in no hurry for a parley. Any time within six weeks would do. At this announcement the regent had nothing for it but to withdraw. Drenched to the skin, and burning at the insult offered ...
— The Swedish Revolution Under Gustavus Vasa • Paul Barron Watson
... a perfect contrast to that other tale, equally typical of the time, the fable of Faust. Though there was a real man of this name, a charlatan and necromancer who, in his extensive wanderings visited Wittenberg, probably in 1521, and who died about 1536-7, his life was but a peg on which to hang a moral. He became the type of the man who had sold his soul to the devil in return for the power to know everything, to do everything ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... Consultations." 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, though sometimes he ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... self-esteem ... You see, Lisaveta, at the bottom of my soul—translated into the intellectual—I have all the suspicion of the artist type with which each one of my honorable forefathers up yonder in that cramped city would have encountered any charlatan or adventurous 'artist' that might have entered his house. Listen to this. I know a banker, a gray-haired business man, who possesses the ability to write stories. He makes use of this talent in his hours of leisure, and ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... this: that all 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 failures as ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... religious fanatics on my staff,' he would sneer. 'If I ever meet your charlatan guru, I shall give ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... eyes and his great black beard. "By all means, come. It will be a comfort to me to know that I have one ally in the hall, however inefficient and ignorant of the subject he may be. I fancy there will be a large audience, for Waldron, though an absolute charlatan, has a considerable popular following. Now, Mr. Malone, I have given you rather more of my time than I had intended. The individual must not monopolize what is meant for the world. I shall be pleased to see you at the lecture to-night. In the meantime, ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... possession la plupart des voyageurs! Mais chez lui ce sont des erreurs geographiques si 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; d'autres ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, Volume 10 - Asia, Part III • Richard Hakluyt
... Nevsky contemptuously. "The spirilla fever has affected your brains. Bah! I will not stay with those who are so ready to suspect an old comrade on the mere word of a charlatan. Boris Kazanovitch, do you stand there silent and let this insult ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... once in five years I would willingly wait for it and maintain him in leisure, if need be, in the intervals; but that would be a sorry account to present to them. Five years of this sort of thing, moreover, would effectually settle the question. I wish he were less of a genius and more of a charlatan! He 's too confoundedly all of one piece; he won't throw overboard a grain of the cargo to save the rest. Fancy him thus with all his brilliant personal charm, his handsome head, his careless step, his look as of a nervous nineteenth-century Apollo, and you will understand that there is mighty ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... Cafe of the Nouvelle Athenes, Monet was a laughing-stock. Manet 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 professing ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... laugh? We live in an enlightened age, and yet a great proportion of the people, perhaps not a majority, still believe in incantations, have faith in ignorant practitioners who advertise a "natural gift," or a secret process or remedy, and prefer the charlatan who is exactly on the level of the Indian Medicine Man, to the regular practitioner, and to the scientific student of mind and body and of the properties of the materia medica. Why, even here in Connecticut, it is impossible ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... a thousand times? A thief has the world's sympathies always. It is always the Barabbas—the trickster in talent, the forger of stolen wisdom, the bravo of political crime, the huckster of plundered thoughts, the charlatan of false art, whom the vox populi elects and sets free, and sends on his way rejoicing. 'Will ye have Christ or Barabbas?' Every generation is asked the same question, and every generation gives the same answer; and scourges the divinity out of its midst, and ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... of which Dickens and Thackeray were the greater lights was Bulwer Lytton,—versatile; subjective in genius; sentimental, and yet not sensational; reflective, yet not always sound in morals; learned in general literature, but a charlatan in scientific knowledge; worldly in his spirit, but not a pagan; an inquisitive student, seeking to penetrate the mysteries of Nature as well as to paint characters and events in other times; and leaving a higher moral impression when he was ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... should have been unable to distinguish between logic and looseness of reasoning, or that the whole assembly, who had been in the habit of hearing those pre-eminent orators, should have been tricked by theatric dexterity or charlatan rhetoric into homage. The oration must have been a most magnificent performance, and we have only to deplore the loss of a ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... steel on flint. "Gentlemen, this man is a charlatan. As his power grows his menace increases. Consolidated has never brooked disobedience nor insolence. It has been our policy to reward the faithful servant and punish the unfaithful." He glanced around the group, then ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... able to do so—extremely doubtful characters, as a rule—that I think is much to be condemned. I deny that there are any living mediums of communication between the spirit world and this one, and I should always judge the man or woman who claimed such power to be a charlatan. But that spirits of the departed have appeared and been recognized by the ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... impression among the painters of Germany, when he published his 'Farbenlehre,' in which he endeavoured to overthrow Newton's theory of colours. This theory he deemed so obviously absurd, that he considered its author a charlatan, and attacked him with ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... 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 ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... with the class of writers it could secure, made the new paper a dangerous rival. Mr. Bonner concluded to make the first issue serviceable to himself. His paragraph advertising was considered sensational, and smacking of the charlatan. He resolved to make it respectable. He wrote half a column in sensational style: 'Buy Harper's Weekly!'—'Buy Harper's Weekly!'—'Buy Harper's Weekly!'—'Buy Harper's Weekly!'—and so on through the half column. Through his advertising agent he sent this advertisement ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... 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 well believe ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... were addressed, gives touching testimony to the sincere piety of his character. No man was ever more devoted to a high purpose, no man had ever more right to imagine himself, or less inclination to pronounce himself, entrusted with a divine mission. There was nothing of the charlatan in his character. His nature was true and steadfast. No narrow-minded usurper was ever more loyal to his own aggrandisement than this large-hearted man to the cause of oppressed humanity. Yet it was inevitable ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... but 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 ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells
... everything! You look and think; what clever fellows you are—Oh people! You merit reward and respect! You've arranged life cleverly. Everything is good, everything is pleasant. Only you, our successors, you are devoid of all live feelings! Any little charlatan from among the commoners is cleverer than you! Take that Yozhov, for instance, what is he? And yet he represents himself as judge over us, and even over life itself—he has courage. But you, pshaw! You live like beggars! In your joy you are beasts, ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... preside over the functions of human life was the Liver; and it is only with bated breath that any doctor dares question the legitimacy of that monarch's claim. The loyal subjects of King Liver are ever ready to call out "quack," "charlatan," etc., to those who dare repudiate the sovereignty ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison
... one day at San Francisco had come the news of his mother's death; she had left him some money—not much, but enough to set him up in business; so he had cut loose from the charlatan and had opened his 'Dental Parlors' on Polk street, an 'accommodation street' of small shops in the residence quarter of the town. Here he had slowly collected a clientele of butcher boys, shop girls, drug clerks and car conductors. ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... requirements are stern and high, and they exclude the vermin that infest 'politics,' as they are called, and cause them to stink in many nostrils. The self-seeking schemer, the one-eyed partisan, the cynic who disbelieves in ideals of any sort, the charlatan who assumes virtues that he does not possess, and mouths noble sentiments that go no deeper than his teeth, are all shut out by them. The doctrine that a man may do in his public capacity things which would be disgraceful in private life, and yet retain his personal ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... distinguished foreigner with 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 ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... time, as he was still in the service of the State Department. He pronounced him shallow and insincere, and ludicrously ignorant of European affairs. The diplomatists of Europe, he said, were all making fun of his despatches, and looked upon him as only a clever charlatan. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... as a charlatan who contrives to amuse a few idle people," he said. "I don't complain of that; my present position leads necessarily to misinterpretation of myself and my motives. Still, I may at least say that I am the victim of a sincere avowal of my belief in ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins
... progress, and cite as a recent instance of the madness of too much learning the ascription, by the brilliant yet matter-of-fact and practical Tyndall, of almighty "potency" to matter. Of course we should reply that Tyndall was a sincere and earnest student, and not a charlatan or a fanatic; whereto our author might respond, and respond justly, in sharp disclaimer of the latter brace of characters. He seems to be sincere: he can read and think, and does both, as the first part of his book, and much of the rest of it, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... no common 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. To her he meant strength ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... I had no further trouble until four years ago, when, whilst I was staying with a friend in a little place in the province of Burgos, the pain came on again. There was no doctor, no surgeon, nobody. But a charlatan happened to come along who extracted teeth whilst on horseback; and I was in such distress that I was obliged to have recourse to him, and he took out two with the tail end of ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... an itinerant physician, noted for his pomposity; very boastful, and a thorough charlatan.—Donizetti, L'Elisire ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... pursuit, disguised—you, who hold yourself guiltless—I do the same, and you hold me criminal—a robber, perhaps-a murderer it may be! I will tell you what I am: I am a son of Fortune, an adventurer; I live by my wits—so do poets and lawyers, and all the charlatans of the world; I am a charlatan—a chameleon. 'Each man in his time plays many parts:' I play any part in which Money, the Arch-Manager, promises me a livelihood. ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... whatever, I give you my word. You are always timid, Clarke, always; but you know my history. I have devoted myself to transcendental medicine for the last twenty years. I have heard myself called quack and charlatan and impostor, but all the while I knew I was on the right path. Five years ago I reached the goal, and since then every day has been a preparation for what we ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... 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 might have defied a shark. "Monsieur, (said the doctor, inspecting ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... Guest"—he pronounced it "Gvest." "If you are not satisfied with me, and my teaching, you're at liberty to try some one else. If this is a preliminary to inscribing yourself under that miserable humbug, that wretched charlatan, who pretends to teach the piano, do it, and have done with it! No one will hinder you—certainly not I. You're under no necessity to come here beforehand, and apologise, and give your reasons—none of ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... 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 all ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... speaks of the "wise falsifications" of the great masters. Before his death the critics, tiring of him sooner than the public, called Martin tricky, meretricious, mechanical. To be sure, his drawing is faulty, his colour hot and smoky; nevertheless, he was not a charlatan. As David Wilkie wrote: "Weak in all these points in which he can be compared to other artists," he had the compensating quality of an imposing, if at times operatic, imagination. Monkhouse justly says that in Martin's illustrations to Milton the smallness of scale and absence of colour enable ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... brings terror into his slumbers, he knew little more of the history, topography, and art-treasures of Paris than the flock he shepherded. He must have dealt out paralyzing information. The Britons and the Germans seemed not to heed; but now and then the American school-marms unmasked the charlatan. On such occasions his unfaltering impudence reached heights truly sublime. The sharp-witted ladies looked in his eyes, forgot their wrongs, and, if he had told them that the Eiffel Tower had been erected by the Pilgrim Fathers, would have accepted ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... course. I can readily believe that he did. Doctor St. Jean is not a very bad man, but he is a charlatan and a dullard; he received the story of my reported insanity as he received me, as an advantage to his institution, and he never gave himself the unprofitable trouble to investigate the circumstances. I told him the truth about ...
— Capitola the Madcap • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... harmonies from all sources, however strange or weird, the success of a Chinaman possessing the slightest facility with the brush was assured from the first. His industrious compatriots in the local laundries, themselves more impassionate critics, doubtless regarded Ling Hop as an impudent charlatan; but Boston in its most restricted and exclusive sense looked at his work with interest and respect, though sadly without humor. The guest stood silently before the portrait, scanning it earnestly, almost with anxiety, blinking his almond eyes behind his shell-rimmed glasses. ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... Richard Wagner, but of him he spoke not with anger but with good-humoured laughter. He was a charlatan but a successful charlatan, and in that was always something for the comic spirit ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... nature, what horrible crimes have been committed in thy name! Every fool, from king to policeman, from the flatheaded parson to the visionless dabbler in science, presumes to speak authoritatively of human nature. The greater the mental charlatan, the more definite his insistence on the wickedness and weaknesses of human nature. Yet, how can any one speak of it today, with every soul in a prison, with every ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... was alone she ran to the Baron, and with a sickening heart sought to allay the flux of blood. The touch of the skin of that great charlatan revolted her to the toes; the wound, in her ignorant eyes, looked deathly; yet she contended with her shuddering, and, with more skill at least than the Chancellor's, staunched the welling injury. An eye ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... designs, and great thoughts are of necessity reflected in the smallest actions, and that so faithfully, that should a conspirator shuffle and cut a pack of playing-cards, he will write the history of his plot for the eyes of the seer styled gypsy, fortune-teller, charlatan, or what not. If you once admit fate, which is to say, the chain of links of cause and effect, astrology has a locus standi, and becomes what it was of yore, a boundless science, requiring the same faculty of deduction by which Cuvier became so ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... the agitation was widespread and of great value. To be sure our friends, on all sides, fell off, and those especially who wished us to be silent on the question of woman's rights, declared "the cause too sacred to be advocated by such a charlatan as George Francis Train." We thought otherwise, as the accession of Mr. Train increased the agitation twofold. If these fastidious ladies and gentlemen had come out to Kansas and occupied the ground and provided "the sinews ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... finesse, imposition, imposture, swindle, humbug, bubble, wile, deception, stratagem, bunko, blind, thimblerigging; impostor, deceiver, quack, mountebank, thimblerigger, charlatan, empiric, trickster, swindler, blackleg, bamboozler, sharper; ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... believing man, with little or no sense of humour, he has succeeded as well in life as in his printed performances. The spirit that was in him has come forth most eloquently in his actions. Many who have only read his poetry have been tempted to set him down as an ass, or even as a charlatan; but I never met any one who had known him personally who did not profess a solid affection and respect for the man's character. He practises as he professes; he feels deeply that Christian love for all men, that toleration, that cheerful delight in serving others, which he often celebrates in ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... went before him, and who like him pulled down, but could not, like him, build up. He resembled them, however, in the possession of another element of character, namely, that poetic imagination which looks abroad into the regions of possibilities, and foresees or invents. But in the case of the charlatan, the vaguest suggestions of his mind in its favourite mood, is adopted as a theory all but proved, if not as a direct revelation to the favoured individual; while the true thinker seeks but an hypothesis corresponding in some measure to facts already ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... it seemed wicked to waste it by going to bed, so he walked on, all unconsciously going in the direction of Heron Hall. The remarks about his father which had fallen from the bagman, stuck to him for a time like a burr: it isn't pleasant to hear your father described as a kind of charlatan and trickster, and Stafford would have liked to have collared the man and knocked an apology out of him; but there are certain disadvantages attached to the position of gentlemen, and one of them ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... human efficiency; human mental, moral, and physical development; human civilization in all of its aspects, are a matter of slow evolution, with many a slip backward. He is either self-deceived or a charlatan who claims to have found that which will enable the race to arrive at perfection in a ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... adventurers." This was Cola Di Rienzi, who was born in Rome about 1313, and who is sometimes styled "an Italian patriot." In his ambitious endeavor to reinstate the Caesarean power in Italy he appears alternately in the figure of a hero and the character of a charlatan. Believing himself the founder of a new era, he was inflamed by his successes, and ended in "mystical extravagances and follies which could not fail to ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... in order to laugh unpleasantly. "Once a salesman always a salesman, Weener. Lie to yourself, deny facts, brazen it out. The world was safe behind the saltband too, in the days when Josephine Francis was a quack and charlatan." ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... Warburton's most obvious weakness. Warburton, with his imperfect scholarship, and vast masses of badly assimilated learning, was jealous of the reputation of the thoroughly trained and accurate critic. It was the dislike of a charlatan for the excellence which he endeavoured to simulate. Bolingbroke, it may be added, was equally contemptuous in his language about men of learning, and for much the same reason. He depreciated what he could not rival. Pope, always under the influence of some stronger companions, ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... these words Anna Pavlovna was somewhat lifting the veil from the secret of the countess' malady, an unwary young man ventured to express surprise that well known doctors had not been called in and that the countess was being attended by a charlatan who might employ ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... the influence of the audience on the writer are many. First of all comes a fault far enough removed from the characteristic vices of the charlatan—to wit, sheer timidity and weakness. There is a kind of stage-fright that seizes on a man when he takes pen in hand to address an unknown body of hearers, no less than when he stands up to deliver himself to a sea of expectant faces. This is the true ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... 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 ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... Perkins, "a 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 made a specialty of yellow ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... and sufficiently profitable to reward themselves. Medical science in particular may boast of a numerous host of these worthies: it would far exceed the limits of this publication to trace the progress of the charlatan, through the records of ancient history; for the sake of brevity, a retrospective glance must not be directed beyond the fifteenth century, when the arch priest of "modern quackery" made his appearance upon the medical stage. In the year 1493, Phillippus Aureolus Theophrastus Paracelsus Bombastus ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... it existed in his time. Most of our modern medicine and surgery was anticipated in the olden time; but it may be said that all of the modes of the quack are as old as humanity. Galen's description of the travelling charlatan who settled down in his front yard, not knowing that it belonged to a physician, shows this very well. There were evidently as many of them and as many different kinds in Mondeville's time as in our ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... fortune and position, I have studied, and 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 wise ones—who ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... of those wandering scholars who gained a livelihood by cures for the sick and lessons for the young. Under him Avicenna read the Isagoge of Porphyry and the first propositions of Euclid. But the pupil soon found his teacher to be but a charlatan, and betook himself, aided by commentaries, to master logic, geometry and the Almagest. Before he was sixteen he not merely knew medical theory, but by gratuitous attendance on the sick had, according ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... it mingle with the 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 ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... miserable manner under the influence of a man named Teedon, a schoolmaster crazed 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 weakness ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith
... In announcing even the greatest and most important discoveries, the true philosopher will communicate his details with modesty and reserve; he will rather be a useful servant of the public, bringing forth a light from under his cloak when it is needed in darkness, than a charlatan exhibiting fireworks and having a trumpeter to announce their magnificence. I see you are smiling, and think what I am saying in bad taste; yet, notwithstanding, I will provoke your smiles still further by saying a word or two on his other moral qualities. That ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... primal brain—nearer nature than our own—the directness of a child mingles with the profoundest cunning. He believes easily in powers of light and darkness, yet is a sceptic all the while. Stirling knew this; but he could not know just when, if ever, the young charlatan Cheschapah would succeed in cheating the older chiefs; just when, if ever, he would strike the chord of their superstition. Till then they would reason that the white man was more comfortable as a friend than as a foe, that rations and gifts of clothes and farming implements were ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... reorganisation he resigned his post, confessing that he left the army no nearer efficiency than it was before. Charles was replaced at the War Office by General Mack. Within six months this bustling charlatan imagined himself to have effected the reorganisation of which the Archduke despaired, [110] while he had in fact only introduced new confusion into an army already hampered beyond any in Europe by its variety of races ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... communications. Spirits, I suppose, like earthly people, are obliged to use such instruments as will answer their purposes; but rather than receive a message from a dead friend through the organism of a rogue or charlatan, methinks I would choose to wait till we meet. But what most astonishes me is the indifference with which I listen to these marvels. They throw old ghost stories quite into the shade; they bring the whole world of spirits down amongst us, visibly and audibly; they are absolutely ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... at first intended me to succeed him in business one day, but as I showed greater aptitude than he had expected, he destined me, on the advice of his friends, to be a doctor; for if a doctor has learned a little more than the ordinary charlatan, he can make his fortune in Constantinople. Many Franks frequented our house, and one of them persuaded my father to allow me to travel to his native land to the city of Paris, where such things could be best ...
— The Severed Hand - From "German Tales" Published by the American Publishers' Corporation • Wilhelm Hauff
... blazed with jewels and merchandise; the stonemasons were at work on the new buildings; the lemonade venders, with their gay reservoirs upon their backs, were plying a noisy trade; the bill-stickers were papering boardings and lamp-posts with variegated advertisements; the charlatan, in his gaudy chariot, was selling pencils and penknives to the accompaniment of a hand-organ; soldiers were marching to the clangor of military music; the merchant was in his counting-house, the stock-broker at the Bourse, and the lounger, whose name is Legion, was sitting in the open air outside ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... though by no possibility an heroic one. In reading this little volume, one cannot fail to be struck with the presence of mind and the absence of heart of which it gives evidence. It is the advertisement of a charlatan, whose sole inheritance is the right to manufacture the Napoleonic pill, and we read with unavoidable distrust the vouchers of its wonderful efficacy. We do not fancy the Bonapartist grape-cure, nor ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... father of 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 is nothing in it to justify anyone ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... him in the ribs) Away, you charlatan! I reckon you have killed more people than I have ...
— The Stepmother, A Drama in Five Acts • Honore De Balzac
... great national reformer, and who 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 ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... 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 celebrity has tended to ground itself upon agreement ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... capture of this final perfection of statement of his own thought refreshed him in a way which is one of the mysteries of that wild charlatan imagination, who now and then administers tonics to the weary which are of inexplicable value. John Penhallow felt the sudden uplift and quickened his pace until he paused within the bastion lines of the fort. Before him, with her back to him, sat Leila. Her hat ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... upon whose cloth has been traced in the yellowest of coffee stains the trail of the Japanese advance—to sit there with one eye on your umbrella and the other upon the bogus bottle from which you drop the counterfeit sauce foisted upon us by the cursed charlatan who assumes to be our dear old lord and friend, ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... necessary virtues of their profession; and the delightful fruits of liberty, truth, benevolence, and a patriotic pride were blended in their character, with a slight admixture of human frailties. No people on earth was more easily governed by a prudent prince, and none with more difficulty by a charlatan or a tyrant. Nowhere was the popular voice so infallible a test of good government as here. True statesmanship could be tried in no nobler school, and a sickly artificial policy had none ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... hygiene or the threatened results of evil ways are likely to make them, by the history of a certain Dr. John Burnett, a physician, who made an immense fortune in New York. This is found as a feuilleton at the foot of the page, under the title 'Un Bon Charlatan.' ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... but because such persons by bringing in new divinities persuade many to adopt foreign principles of law. As a result conspiracies, factions, and clubs arise which are far from desirable under a monarchy. Accordingly, do not grant any atheist or charlatan the right to be at large. The art of soothsaying is a necessary one and you should by all means appoint some men to be diviners and augurs, to whom people can resort who desire to consult them on any matter; but there ought to be no workers of magic at all. Such men tell partly truth but mostly ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. 4 • Cassius Dio
... revival of all the massacrant illuminism in which the Princess herself is dabbling. So we have on the scene not only (as the reader sees at once, though some rather clumsy efforts are made to hide it) the resuscitated Albert, who passes as a certain Trismegistus, not only the historical charlatan Saint-Germain, but another charlatan at this time not at all historical (seeing that the whole story ends in 1760, and he never left Palermo till nine years later), Cagliostro. Even at Spandau Consuelo herself ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... attain artistic excellence. You talk of getting up concerts in low parts of London, of humanising ruffians by the influence of music. Pshaw! humanise humanity at large by devotion to an artistic ideal; the other aim is paltry, imbecile, charlatan.' ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... 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 in consequence." ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... Wells's honesty and proves him to be no poseur. Mr. Wells once held that the upper classes and the lower classes would be so much differentiated in the future that one class would eat the other. Certainly no paradoxical charlatan who had once found arguments for so startling a view would ever have deserted it except for something yet more startling. Mr. Wells has deserted it in favour of the blameless belief that both classes will be ultimately subordinated or assimilated to a sort of scientific ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... passed 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
... Mr. Conway, the boss, that he was a charlatan; that he was running a yellow sheet; that he had the ethics of a hyena; that he was pandering to the worst passions of the ignorant mob and ...
— Death Points a Finger • Will Levinrew
... you have paved the way, With your confounded fantasies, to more Immoral conduct by the fancied sway Your system feigns o'er the controulless core Of human hearts, than all the long array Of poets and romancers:—You 're a bore, A charlatan, a coxcomb—and have been, At best, ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... and engravings; and a third, the craze of the connoisseur for Hogarth's hated "Black Masters," the productions of defunct foreigners. And this naturally brings about the following digression, quite in Hogarth's own way, against that contemporary charlatan, the picture-dealer:—"English painters have an obstacle to overcome, which equally impedes the progress of their talents and of their fortune. They have to contend with a class of men whose business it is to sell pictures; and as, for these ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... jeered behind my back if they thought me sincere! How they must have despised me if they thought me nothing but an advertising quack! Zora Middlemist, for heaven's sake tell me what you have thought of me. What have you taken me for—a madman or a charlatan?" ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... 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 ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... the trembling and shaking of the place wherein it is present. Yet, on the other side, the 'cold non- natural wind' of seances, of Swedenborg, and of a hundred stories, old or new, is undeniably felt by some sceptical observers, even on occasions where no professional charlatan is engaged. As to the trembling and shaking of the house or hut, where the spirit is alleged to be, we shall examine some curious evidence, ancient and modern, savage and civilised. So of the other phenomena. Some seem to be of easy natural invention, others not so; and, in the latter case, independent ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... the world, "you must not go. If you dare climb over the fence—if you dare go out of the yard," said the world, "I will punish you—I will ridicule you, condemn you, persecute you, ostracize you. I will brand you false, a self-seeker, a pretender, a charlatan, a trickster, a rogue. I will cry you unsafe, dangerous, a menace to society and the race, an evil to all that is good, an unspeakable fool. Stay in the yard," said the world, "and you may ...
— Their Yesterdays • Harold Bell Wright
... wholesale plundering. In stock affairs innovations are resented and resisted even more fiercely than in other walks of life, and the Boston money crowd fought me tooth and nail. The titles I acquired in those days were varied and startling. For one set I was a "charlatan," "wizard," "fakir," an "unprincipled manipulator"; in another I was a "copper king" or a "prince of plungers." Feeling ran high, and prices rose and fell in the most erratic and extravagant fashion. Certain stocks advanced or receded from five to ten points in as many hours or minutes. ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... medicine is subject to great variations. It is only of real value when, free from all charlatanism, it rests on a sufficiently scientific basis; for the art of an ignoramus falls into error and employs inappropriate methods; on the other hand, the art of a charlatan has for its object the purse of the patient. It is common to meet with physicians who have a good practical experience of art without possessing scientific knowledge, others who have both practical experience and science but are ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... 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 only chance for the French modern Tartuffe is to confess and ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... challenge, she is lost." His brows knitted. "To defy the world of science in that way will make her fair game for every charlatan in the city. The press will unite to destroy her. I will see Clarke and Pratt myself. For the sake of their own cause they must not enter on such a foolish plan. Unless this life has already eaten deep into the ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... with a gold medal. From there he made a triumphal tour through Europe, appearing in Berlin, Paris and London. He was acknowledged the most wonderful violinist that had ever been heard. He soon amassed a colossal fortune. Withal, Paganini was almost as much a charlatan as he was an original genius. He liked to impress his audiences by fantastic eccentricities and by mere tricks of legerdemain, such as dropping and catching his instrument, or breaking one string after another to finish his concert on one alone. Other tricks of virtuosity, such ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... by M. Neufchateau, Gil Blas might be adapted to any court, or age, or country. For instance, if Triaquero, meaning a charlatan, (which, by the way, it does not,) refers of necessity to Voltaire, might not any Englishman, if the work had been published recently, insist that the work must have been written by an Englishman, as the allusion could apply to no one so well as him, who, having been a judge without law, and a ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... as an adventurer, a schemer, a charlatan, Law originally deserved anything but such a verdict of his public. Dishonest he was not, insincere he never was; and as a student of fundamentals, he was in advance of his age, which is ever to be accursed. His ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... There is a charlatan of the name of Chobert, who calls himself the Fire King, who has been imposing upon the world for a year or more, exhibiting all sorts of juggleries in hot ovens, swallowing poisons, hot lead, &c.; but yesterday he was detected signally, and after a dreadful uproar ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... promised to teach any language, ancient or modern, in six months. He traveled throughout Europe, endeavoring to sell his discovery to princes and men of learning. Purchasers had to agree strictly to maintain the secret. Professor Williams speaks of this conduct as follows: "These were the acts of a charlatan peddling some secret quack nostrum."[93] Mr. Quick says, "He would also found a school in which all arts and sciences should be rapidly learned and advanced; he would introduce, and peacefully maintain throughout the continent, a uniform speech, a uniform government, and, more wonderful still, ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... THIS is what 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 ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... attention, we might—we might witness a revelation!" Perceiving at this moment, I suppose, my halting comprehension reflected in my puzzled face, this interesting rhapsodist paused and blushed. Then with a melancholy smile, "You think me a moonstruck charlatan, I suppose. It's not my habit to bang about the piazza and pounce upon innocent tourists. But tonight, I confess, I am under the charm. And then, somehow, I fancied you too were ...
— The Madonna of the Future • Henry James
... tune of the piece was a march used with Meyerbeerian effectiveness to bring down the curtain. The stout verve of this "El Capitan" march gave it a large vogue outside the opera. Hopper next produced "The Charlatan," a work bordering upon opera comique in its first version. Both of these works scored even larger success ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... fortune-telling—he bracketed them all together in his own mind—had never interested him in the least. But he realized dimly what a wonderful chance this new fashionable craze—for so he regarded it—gives to the charlatan. He had always felt an attraction to that extraordinary eighteenth century adventurer, Cagliostro, and to-night he suddenly remembered a certain passage in Casanova's memoirs.... He felt rather sorry that they hadn't planned out this—this seance, ...
— From Out the Vasty Deep • Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
... hands of a cunning and selfish and ruthless charlatan, is the sight that daily meets ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... of disillusionment she felt only that the man was working upon his audience like a sleight-of-hand performer; and the longer she observed, and the stronger his spell over the others, the deeper became her contempt for the "charlatan." He seemed to her like one telling a lie—as that one seems, while telling it, to the hearer who is not deceived. "I've been thinking him rough but genuine," said she to herself. "He's merely rough." She had forgiven, had disregarded his rude almost coarse manners, setting ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... 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 ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... 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 ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... 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 ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... were to 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 Sign Of The Red Cross • Evelyn Everett-Green
... 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 man to consolidate ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... 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, ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... what they disliked was his arrogance, which nobody felt to be altogether deniable. They implied that he was insolent, pretentious, and given to that reckless innovation for the sake of noise and show which was the essence of the charlatan. ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... discourse on this occasion; but I know that sort of man always has a leaning to the Abimelech and Jedediahs of biblical history; solely, I believe, because the names have a sonorous roll with them that is pleasant in the mouth of the charlatan. ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... Poet, unless he be a charlatan, pretend to bring home some hieratic message above the understanding of his fellows: for he is an interpreter, and the interpreter's success depends upon hitting his hearer's intelligence. Failing that, he misses everything and is null. To put ...
— Poetry • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Rousseau were the equivocal pernicious influence, half-priest, half-pandar, half-charlatan, half-prophet of a world-disintegrating orgy of sentiment, should I for one, I am tempted to ask, close the gates of our platonic ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... is that any reason why you should go and set up a brand-new one—an ugly anachronism besides,' retorted the squire. 'However, you and I have no common ground—never had. I say know, you say feel. Where is the difference, after all, between you and any charlatan of the lot? Well, ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... sneer: "Monte-Cristo, the infidel charlatan, is miles away. With all his boasted power he can do nothing to aid you. I have you now, ...
— The Son of Monte Cristo • Jules Lermina
... birth of our new Centennial let us eschew the political charlatan, and bring forward our statesmen to serve and govern a people, who, to become a unit of strength, must ever bear in mind the words of the great southern statesman, who said he knew "no north, no south, no east, no west; but one ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... 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 Muscavado, Senor Grandissimo Bastinado. His was the rental of half Havana, And ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... emphasize in this little 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 ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... senseless adulators. While he lived, every imaginable calumny, plausible and unplausible, was invented to besmirch his character and his art. Now it is, in Germany at least, no longer safe to revile him on the ground of his technical artistic style. The days are long past when the terms "charlatan," "amateur," "artistic anarchist" could be applied to him with impunity, and it is fully recognized by all who have any title to speak that Wagner, so far from being a revolutionary destroyer, was, like all true reformers—Luther, for example, or Jeremiah or Sokrates—an extreme conservative. Those ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... all hostile criticism of the paper, people read the Express—many staid ones surreptitiously—for it had a snap, a go, a tang, that at times almost took the breath. And despite the estimate of its editor as a charlatan, the people had yielded to that aggressive personage a rank of high importance ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... already formed their opinion of this officer, and saw a presumptuous charlatan where others had admired an able warrior. His own conduct soon convinced them that they neither had been rash nor mistaken. The King of Naples demanding, in 1798, from his son-in-law, the Emperor of Germany, a general to organize and head ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... for your good, though you cannot understand it. What does it matter to me whether you do it or not; my efforts are entirely on your account." All these fine speeches with which you hope to make him good, are preparing the way, so that the visionary, the tempter, the charlatan, the rascal, and every kind of fool may catch him in his snare or draw him ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... said Mrs. Arrowpoint. "Because you don't wish to marry a nobleman, you are not obliged to marry a mountebank or a charlatan." ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... the above extracts, should have continued to mistake a stranger for his own sister, with whom he had lived from childhood, seems a very absurd supposition. Nor is it likely that an impostor would have exposed herself to such a formidable test. If it had been a bold charlatan who, taking advantage of the quite general belief, to which we have ample testimony, that there was something more in the execution at Rouen than was allowed to come to the surface, had resolved to usurp for herself the honours due to the woman who had saved France, she would hardly ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... about whom so many marvelous stories are told. You know that he represented himself as the Wandering Jew, as the discoverer of the elixir of life, of the philosopher's stone, and so forth. Some laughed at him as a charlatan; but Casnova, in his memoirs, says that he was a spy. But be that as it may, St. Germain, in spite of the mystery surrounding him, was a very fascinating person, and was much sought after in the best circles of society. Even to this day my grandmother ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... you like that of a fire. He astonishes a reader and provokes him, he moves him and annoys him. There is always some falsity of note in him, which accounts for the malaise he so constantly excites in me. The great poet in him cannot shake off the charlatan. ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... and the real strength of the book lie in a remarkable study of character-development—that of the chief personage, Horace. It is a cleverly painted portrait of a type that reappears, with slight modifications, in all ages; a moral charlatan, who half imposes on himself, and entirely for a while on other people. A would-be hero, genius, and chivalrous lover, he has none of the genuine qualities needed for sustaining the parts. Nonchalant and inert of temperament, ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... 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
... remained, and who constituted the great majority of the membership, had quieted down, the president remarked that the interruption which they had just experienced was quite in line with all the other proceedings of the disturbers of public tranquillity who, under the lead of a crazy American charlatan, were trying to deceive the ignorant multitude. But they would find themselves seriously in error if they imagined that their absurd ideas were going to be "taken ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss |
