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Isle of Lanterns (The)

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or Lantern-land. An imaginary country inhabited by pretenders to knowledge. In French, Lanternois. (Rabelais: Pantagruel, v. 32, 33.)

⁂ Lucian has a similar conceit, called the City of Lanterns; and Dean Swift, in his Gulliver’s Travels, makes his hero visit Laputa, the empire of quacks, false projectors, and pretenders to science.

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Entry taken from Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, edited by the Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D. and revised in 1895.