This vast, lumbering, ignorant, dull witted lout was stage struck, and irrecoverably.

Know you not, lout, vagabond, beggar, that were it not for the might that she infuses into my arm I should not have strength enough to kill a flea?

'It would be better to be this poor Peggotty, or his lout of a nephew,' he said, getting up and leaning moodily against the chimney-piece, with his face towards the fire, 'than to be myself, twenty times richer and twenty times wiser, and be the torment to myself that I have been, in this Devil's bark of a boat, within the last half-hour!'

At the beginning of his career, Pröll became a target of some ridicule because his name "Pröll" literally means something like "lout" in German.