list, born at Besancon, the son
of a cooper; worked in a printing establishment, spent his spare hours in
study, specially of the social problem, and in 1840 published a work
entitled "What is Property?" and in which he boldly enunciated the
startling proposition, "Property is theft"; for the publication of this
thesis he was at first unmolested, and only with its application was he
called to account, and for which at last, in 1849, he was committed to
prison, where, however, he kept himself busy with his pen, and whence he
from time to time emitted socialistic publications till his release in
1852, after which he was in 1858 compelled to flee the country, to return
again under an act of amnesty in 1860 and die; he was not only the
assailant of property, but of government itself, and preached anarchy as
the goal of all social progress and not the starting-point, as so many
unfortunately fancy; but by anarchy, it would seem, he meant the right of
government spiritually free, and, in the Christian sense of that
expression, to exemption from all external control (see I Tim. i. 9)
(1809-1865).

PROUT, SAMUEL, eminent English water-colour artist, born at
Plymouth; had from a child an irrepressible penchant for drawing, which,
though discouraged at first by his father, was fostered by his
schoolmaster; was patronised by Britton the antiquary, and employed by
him to assist him in collecting materials for his "Beauties of England
and Wales," but it was not till his visit to Rouen in 1818 that he was
first fascinated with the subject that henceforth occupied him; from this
time excursions were continually made to the Continent, and every corner
of France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Italy ransacked for its
fragments of carved stone; the old architecture that then fascinated him
henceforth became a conspicuous feature in all his after-works; "the
works of Prout," says Ruskin, "will one day become memorials of the most
precious of things that have been ... A time will come when that zeal
will be understood, and his works will be cherished with a melancholy
gratitude, when the pillars of Venice shall be mouldering in the salt
shallows of her sea, and the stones of the goodly towers of Rouen have
become ballast for the barges of the Seine" (1789-1852).

PROUT, FATHER. See MAHONY, FRANCIS.

PROVENCAL LANGUAGE, one of the Romance dialects of France, spoken in
the South of France, and different from that spoken in the N. as i