Legerdemain vs Artfulness - What's the difference?
legerdemain | artfulness |
Sleight of hand; "magic" trickery.
*1596 , (Edmund Spenser), The Faerie Queene , V.9:
*:For he in slights and jugling feates did flow, / And of legierdemayne the mysteries did know.
A show of skill or deceitful ability.
*1673 , Gilbert Burnet, The mystery of iniquity unvailed , London, p. 128:
*:Certainly, that they are to this day so rife in Italy and Spain, and so scant in Britain, is a shrewd ground to apprehend Legerdemain, and forgery, in the accounts we get of their later Saints.