1612-13, John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi Act I, Scene III,
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.
A spectre or ghost.
A migratory bird that makes a temporary stop somewhere.
adjective
Visiting.
1677, Thomas d’Urfey, Madam Fickle, or, The Witty False One, London: James Magnes & Richard Bentley, Act III, Scene 2, p. 33,
Now the plots unravell’d: I begin to have a knowledge of the visitant Kinsman that us’d to molest us.