Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/743

Rh P R E P R E 719 seded by an iron-foundry ; and (2) an ancient hospital dedicated to St Mary Magdalen, now occupied by the Roman Catholic church of St Walpurgis. The town is celebrated for its merchant guild celebrations, of which the earliest on record is that of 1329. On account of the devastations to which the district was subjected by the Danes the church of York abandoned its possessions, and Tostig, brother of Harold, became lord paramount. At the Conquest it was granted, along with other possessions, to Roger de Poictou, and on his defection was forfeited to the crown. It possessed at an early period the charter of &quot;a guild merchant, with hanse&quot; and other customs belonging to such guild. Another charter was granted by Henry II., conferring on the inhabitants similar privileges and liberties to those enjoyed by the inhabitants of Newcastle-on-Tyne. Its privileges were confirmed and extended by King John, and in the 23d of Edward I. it obtained the right to send members to parliament. In 1323 Robert Bruce partly destroyed it by fire. In 1617 it was visited by James I. on his return from Scotland. On the outbreak of the Civil War it declared for King Charles, but on the 12th February 1643 it was taken by the Parliamentary forces under Sir John Seaton. Near the town, on the 17th of August 1648, the Scots under Hamilton sustained an overwhelming defeat from Oliver Cromwell. On the 9th of November 1715 Preston was occupied by the troops of the Pretender, and by their surrender on the 13th of the same month the death-blow was given to his cause. On the 27th of November 1745 it was entered by Charles, the young Pretender, on his Quixotic march towards London. By the Muni cipal Act of 1835 the borough is divided into six wards, comprising the ancient borough of Preston and the township of Fishwick, and is governed by a mayor, twelve aldermen, and thirty-six councillors. Whittle, Historical Account of Trenton, 1821-37 ; Dobson, History of the Parlia mentary Representation of Preston, 1850, 2d oil. 1868; Id., Preston in the Olden Time, 1850 ; Id., History of Preston Guild, 1802 ; Hardwick, History of Preston, 1857; Hewitson, History of Preston, 1883. PRESTWICH, a township of Lancashire, is situated on a branch of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway, 4 miles north-west of Manchester and 5 south of Bury. It possesses cotton manufactures, but consists chiefly of handsome mansions and villas inhabited by Manchester merchants. The church of St Bartholomew occupies an eminence overlooking the Irwell. In the neighbourhood is the county lunatic asylum. The population of the urban sanitary district (area, 1917 acres) in 1871 was 6820, and in 1881 it was 8627. PRESUMPTION. See EVIDENCE, vol. viii. p. 742 sq. PREVESA, the chief town of a sandjak in the Turkish vilayet of Janina, commanding the entrance to the Gulf of Arta. Its harbour is small, but it is a port of call for the steamers of the Austrian Lloyd and has a considerable trade in the export of oil, wool, valonia, &c. Prevesa, which represents the ancient NICOPOLIS (q.v.*), has a popu lation of about 7000. PREVOST, PIERRE (1751-1839), son of a Protestant clergyman in Geneva, was born in that city on 3d March 1751, and was educated for a clerical career. But he for sook it for law, and this too he quickly deserted to devote himself to education and to travelling. He became inti mate with J. J. Rousseau, and, a little later, with Dugald Stewart, having previously distinguished himself as a trans lator of and commentator on Euripides. Frederick II. of Prussia secured him in 1780 as professor of philosophy, and made him member of the Academy of Sciences in Berlin. He there became acquainted with Lagrange, and was thus led to turn his attention to science. After some years spent on political economy (as in Adam Smith s Wealth of Nations) and on the principles of the fine arts (in connexion with which lie wrote, for the Berlin Memoirs, a remarkable dissertation on poetry) he returned to Geneva and commenced his works on magnetism and on heat. In terrupted occasionally in his studies by political duties, in which he was often called to the front, he remained pro fessor of philosophy at Geneva till he was called in 1810 to the chair of physics. He died at Geneva on 8th April 1839. Prevost published much on philology, philosophy, and political economy ; but he will be remembered mainly on two accounts (1) his having published, with additions of his own, the posthumous memoirs of the ingenious Le Sage (see ATOM, vol. iii. p. 46, and ATTRACTION) ; and (2) his having first enunciated the theory of exchanges (see RADIATION), on which has been based one of the grandest experimental methods of modern times. He was distin guished as much for his moderation, precision, and truth fulness as for his extraordinary versatility. PREVOST D EXILLES, ANTOINE FRANCOIS (1697- 1763), more commonly called the abbe Prevostj one of the most important French novelists of the 18th century, was born at Hesdin in Artois on 1st April 1697. His father was of good family, and held legal employments of some importance. Prevost was educated by the Jesuits, first at Hesdin and then at Paris. At the age of sixteen he left the College d Harcourt and enlisted. This was, however, at the close of the War of the Spanish Succession, and he soon returned to the Jesuits, and was almost persuaded to enter the order. According to some accounts he actually did so, but a truant disposition once more came on him and he again joined the army, apparently obtaining some com mission. It is, however, not easy to make his statement that he passed five or six years thus tally with the positive assertion that in 1719 he once more sought the cloister, this time joining the famous learned community of the Benedictines of St Maur. He took the vows finally in 1720, and it would appear that for some seven years he devoted himself without repining to study at various houses of the order, preaching, teaching, and writing some part of the Gallia Christiana. In 1727, however, or thereabouts (for the details of Prevost s life, though un usually interesting, are most vaguely and insufficiently recorded) he once more broke bounds and fled to Holland. It is said that the immediate occasion was nothing more than a wish which he had formed to be transferred to Cluny, and which made him commit som^ technical mis demeanour. However this may be, he was for six years an exile in Holland and England, and one story even asserts that he contracted a regular or rather irregular marriage during this period. He certainly published the first of his remarkable novels, the Memoires d un Homme de Qualite, in 1728, and continued them for some years. Besides this he produced much miscellaneous work Cleve land, another novel ; Manon Lescaut, his masterpiece (which is a kind of appendix to his first book) ; and a periodical publication, partly in the style of the Spectator and partly in that of a literary review, called Le Pour et le Contre. All these were begun and most of them were finished before 1735, when he was back in France and produced his last novel of importance, the Doyen de Killerine, in which, as in Cleveland, he made much use of his English sojourn. He returned to France openly and with the royal permission, being allowed to wear the dress of the secular priesthood. Among his patrons the cardinal de Bissy and the prince de Conti are named ; the latter made him his chaplain. He lived for nearly thirty years longer, composing, though not for bread, an extraordinary num ber of books, some of them original, some compilations. Amongst them were an Histoire Generate des Voyages, his torical compilations on William the Conqueror and Margaret of Anjou, letters, moral essays, semi-scientific works, trans lations (including Pamela and Clarissa), and some original pieces. Of all these the novel called Histoire dune Grecque Modeme (1741) has alone attracted some attention in modern times. Prevost was a facile writer and a fair critic, but except for his first three novels, and especially for Manon Lescaut, he would hardly be remembered save as a man of a curiously eventful and very imperfectly recorded life. His death itself has a kind of legendary character, and some of the circumstances are, it may be hoped, ficti tious. He lived in a small cottage (for, despite his im mense literary work on subjects which for the most part occupy only writers for money, he seems to have written