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Updated: May 21, 2025
They are, answered Xenomanes, all hypocrites, holy mountebanks, tumblers of beads, mumblers of ave-marias, spiritual comedians, sham saints, hermits, all of them poor rogues who, like the hermit of Lormont between Blaye and Bordeaux, live wholly on alms given them by passengers.
In the gardens and outbuildings of the temple the most inconceivable mountebanks have taken up their quarters, their black streamers, painted with white letters, looking like funeral trappings as they float in the wind from the tops of their tall flagstaffs. Thither we turn our steps, as soon as our mousmes have ended their orisons and bestowed their alms.
In illustration of this he would quote Moses, who preferred the reproach of Israel to the glories of a kingdom offered to him by Pharaoh's daughter; of Esther, who hated the splendid ornaments with which they decked her to make her pleasing in the eyes of Assuerus; of the Apostles, whose greatest joy was to suffer shame and reproach for the name of Jesus; and of David, who danced before the Ark amid a crowd of buffoons and mountebanks, and who exulted in thus making himself appear contemptible in the eyes of Michol, his wife.
This is no age, this is no country, for the war of power against opinion. Those Jacobin mountebanks, whom this bill would at once send back to their native obscurity, would rise into fearful importance. The law would be sometimes braved and sometimes evaded. In short, England would soon be what Ireland was at the beginning of 1829.
Even, comparatively, not very long ago, there might be seen in many of the continental towns quacks and mountebanks exhibiting little rudely-carved figures, which they declared to be genuine mandrakes, assuring their gaping auditors, at the same time, that they were produced from the urine of a gibbeted thief, and seriously warning those who might have to pull any out of the ground to stop their ears first, for otherwise the piercing shrieks of these plants would infallibly strike them with deafness.
It was a jour de fête, and as I drove through the town the streets were gay with holyday people, and crowded in some places with groups of women and girls, whose cheerful countenances proved the admiration with which they viewed the performances of some mountebanks.
The circus is in the centre of the square; and in one corner there are three very large vans in which the mountebanks sleep and dress themselves, three small houses on wheels, with their tiny windows, and a chimney in each of them, which smokes continually; and between window and window the baby's swaddling-bands are stretched.
Sellers of lottery-tickets, writers of love-letters, jugglers and mountebanks plied their trades. The cries of the water-carrier and vender of sweet-meats mingled with those of the inevitable beggar who asked alms for the love of God; invoking blessings or curses upon the head of him who gave or refused him a centavo. Babel reigned.
Why, they might be sitting with us in the smoking-room this very minute," he says. Then he said that no man had a right to take his profession so seriously as these two mountebanks. "How interestin'!" says Lundie. "I've noticed this impatient attitude toward their victim in a good many murderers. I never understood it before. Of course, it's the disposal of the body that annoys 'em.
"There be mountebanks, as well in the civil body as in the natural; I ever served his Majesty with modesty; no shouting, no undertaking." In the odd fashion of the time a fashion in which no one more delighted than himself he lays hold of sacred words to give point to his argument. "I may allude to the three petitions of the Litany Libera nos Domine; parce nobis, Domine; exaudi nos, Domine.
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