tions were warm and strong in him. He was of a tender, loving, and truly upright nature."
He spent some time at Hastings for his health, and when there his parish church was S. Mary's. He attended this church regularly, and the vicar, the Rev. Mr. Vines, used to say: "I always wait for Prout to come and light up my church." Indeed, his temper was always sunny, and he was eminently devout. What touched him profoundly was the piety he noticed among the peasantry abroad—how they uncovered for a brief prayer at the sound of the Angelus, and how they made of their churches a veritable home, where they could pour out their hearts in prayer in all sorrows, and in thanksgiving in all joys. But abroad or at home, in his hotel or his studio, his constant companions were his English Bible and Book of Common Prayer, and with them he said that he was satisfied.
As Mr. Hine says beautifully in his Memoirs of Prout: "All the subjects of his pictures point upwards, the lovely street scenes terminating in the tall tower or the divine spire. The doves hover about the highest ridges of his roofs and the loftiest pinnacles of his towers. He had the most implicit faith in the final article of the Nicene Creed—'I believe in the life of the world to come'—and his own pictures are the faint but beautiful symbols of that celestial city which he saw as through a glass, darkly."
He had been invited with many literary and artistic celebrities to dine with Mr. Ruskin, the elder, on Tuesday, 9 February, 1852, to keep the birthday of John Ruskin, and hear a letter from Venice, from the younger Ruskin, who was then in that city.
Samuel Prout had not been well of late, but he went to the dinner, and returned between ten and eleven, and said to his wife, "I've had such a happy evening!
