prosern.

?1614 G. Chapman in tr. Homer Odysses Ep. Ded. This Prozer Dionysius, and the rest of these graue, and reputatiuely learned.

1627 M. Drayton Elegies in Battaile Agincourt 206 And surely Nashe, though he a Proser were A branch of Lawrell yet deserues to beare.

1815 L. Hunt Feast Poets 14 Such prosers as Johnson, and rhymers as Dryden.

1854 J. R. Lowell Jrnl. Italy in Wks. (1890) I. 125 Poets and prosers have alike compared her [sc. Italy] to a beautiful woman.

1882 Cent. Mag. Nov. 13/2 Fortunately for the present proser, the weather was not always fine.

1938 M. Mitchell Let. 4 Sept. in Gone with the Wind Lett. (1986) 224 Atlanta has always had a lot of poets and some good ones. Now come the prosers.

1977 Washington Post (Nexis) 30 Nov. The evening included readings from the proser of Billings—which turned out to have as much vigor and quirky imagination as his music.

1998 New Yorker 5 Oct. 70/1 A mixed group of writers—poets and prosers—get themselves invited to a college campus.

1769 St. James's Chron. 29–31 Aug. 4/2 Bore... My Father's Word for this intolerable Animal was a Proser.

1810 G. Crabbe Borough v. 68 The Proser who..has Tales of three hours' length.

1845 J. F. Cooper Satanstoe I. ii. 24 His sermons were pithy and short; and he always spoke of your half-hour preachers, as illiterate prosers, who did not understand how to condense their thoughts.

1886 E. Dowden Life Shelley II. v. 210 He would find Gisborne a proser, and a sieve through which much learning had passed.

1919 Internat. Jrnl. Ethics 29 200 She might prefer other company to that of the hectoring oracle of the Mitre, the polysyllabic proser of the Rambler papers.

1991 Guardian (Nexis) 17 Dec. The music isn't as bad as my dad wants us to believe. He says it's too modern and noisy... The old proser must be living in the middle ages.