The abominable mountebank!

[Footnote 1: "I remember," says Addison, in the 240th Tatler, "when our whole island was shaken with an earthquake some years ago, that there was an impudent mountebank who sold pills, which, as he told the country people, were 'very good against an earthquake.'

Marcel remembered immediately the little mountebank, whom he had altogether forgotten, and to whom he had given the address of Monsieur Patin's hotel, where he had expected to stay.

" He could see no merit in Spenser, preferred Tasso to Milton, and called the old English dramatists "mad and turbid mountebanks."

" "Wilt thou have the history of thy coming perils, friend mariner?" cried the mercurial mountebank: "A journal of thy future risks and tempests to amuse you in this calm?

But it was reserved for Swift to produce the most amusing satire which has ever gibbeted these mischievous mountebanks.

The Faust legend is a conglomerate of anonymous popular traditions, largely of medieval origin, which in the latter part of the sixteenth century came to be associated with an actual individual of the name of Faustus whose notorious career during the first four decades of the century, as a pseudo-scientific mountebank, juggler and magician can be traced through various parts of Germany.

Brigham Young no longer seems to the American public a religious mountebank, only one grade removed from the man Orr, who claimed to be the veritable Angel Gabriel, and was killed in a popular commotion which he had himself excited in Dutch Guiana.

The Faust legend is a conglomerate of anonymous popular traditions, largely of medieval origin, which in the latter part of the sixteenth century came to be associated with an actual individual of the name of Faustus whose notorious career during the first four decades of the century, as a pseudo-scientific mountebank, juggler and magician can be traced through various parts of Germany.

" He acted the part perfectly of one of those half-witted, wholly shrewd mountebanks, who pick up a living by taking advantage of tolerance and good nature.

The great power of both spiritual and physical mountebanks rests on that irremovable property of human nature, in force of which indefinite instincts and sufferings find no echo, no resting-place, in the definite and comprehensible.

The minstrels were once a great and flourishing body in England; but their dignity being interwoven with the illusory splendour of feudal institutions, declined on the advance of moral cultivation: they became in time vulgar mountebanks and jugglers, and in the reign of Elizabeth were suppressed as rogues and vagabonds.

" He acted the part perfectly of one of those half-witted, wholly shrewd mountebanks, who pick up a living by taking advantage of tolerance and good nature.