Brewer's: Isle of Lanterns

(The), 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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