Definition of "visitant"

Ambition, madam, is a great man's madness, / That is not kept in chains and close-pent rooms, / But in fair lightsome lodgings, and is girt / With the wild noise of prattling visitants, / Which makes it lunatic beyond all cure.

1612-13, John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi Act I, Scene III

One visit is enough to begin an acquaintance; and this point is gained by it, that when the visitant comes again, he is no more a stranger.

1678, Robert South, “Prevention of Sin an unvaluable Mercy: or A sermon preached upon that subject on 1 Sam. XXV.32, 33”, in Sermons Preached Upon Several Occasions, volume 2, Oxford University Press, published 1842, page 9

The Company had now ſtaid ſo long, that Mrs. Fitzpatrick plainly perceived they all deſigned to ſtay out each other. She therefore reſolved to rid herſelf of Jones, he being the Viſitant, to whom ſhe thought the leaſt Ceremony was due.

1749, Henry Fielding, “Which Consists of Visiting”, in The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, volume V, London: A[ndrew] Millar, […], book XIII (Containing the Space of Twelve Days), page 29

Pleasure is oft a visitant; but painClings cruelly to us, like the gnawing slothOn the deer’s tender haunches: late, and loth,’Tis scar’d away by slow returning pleasure.

1818, John Keats, Endymion‎, Book 1, 906-909

We by no means mean to say that Lady Anne's happy and pleasant little party would not have received a new impetus if a Moore, a Bulwer, a Hook, or those monopolists of beauty and wit, Mrs. Gore and Mrs. Norton, or those daughters of Apollo, ycleped Mitford, Pardoe, and Strickland had been mingled with her "blue spirits and grey;" but we do mean to say that they were very happy without them, and that much, perhaps all, of the "feast of reason and the flow of soul," for which these distinguished individuals are loved, and sought, and honoured, would have been lost in the melée of dancing, singing, chattering, and flirting, to which the major part of the visitants were devoted.

1838 (date written), L[etitia] E[lizabeth] L[andon], chapter XX, in Lady Anne Granard; or, Keeping up Appearances. […], volume I, London: Henry Colburn, […], published 1842, pages 252–253

Mrs. Treadhill, stringy but pleasant, met the visitants in the kitchen, and whined, "He’s failing fast. […] "

1949, Sinclair Lewis, chapter 2, in The God-Seeker, New York: Popular Library, page 13

Matsumura felt almost sure that his ghostly visitant had been none other than the Soul of the Mirror.

1905, Lafcadio Hearn, “The Mirror Maiden”, in The Romance of the Milky Way and Other Studies & Stories‎, Houghton Mifflin, page 134

In the afternoon, Aaron felt the cypresses rising dark about him, like so many high visitants from an old, lost, lost subtle world, where men had the wonder of demons about them, the aura of demons, such as still clings to the cypresses, in Tuscany,

1922, D. H. Lawrence, chapter XIX, in Aaron's Rod, New York: Thomas Seltzer, page 310

Reëstablishment of such facilities would probably soon draw occasional visitants in special need of rest in their desert flights.

1964, Alden Holmes Miller, Robert Cyril Stebbins, chapter 5, in The Lives of Desert Animals in Joshua Tree National Monument, University of California Press, page 49

Now the plots unravell’d: I begin to have a knowledge of the visitant Kinsman that us’d to molest us.

1677, Thomas d’Urfey, Madam Fickle, or, The Witty False One, London: James Magnes & Richard Bentley, Act III, Scene 2, p. 33

Sermons were not encouraged, as the demand on the use of the famous altar by visitant priests and their pilgrims was heavy on Sunday mornings, and even a short sermon held up the next Mass on the list.

1965, Muriel Spark, The Mandelbaum Gate, London: Macmillan, Part Two, Chapter 6