NODIER, CHARLES, able French litterateur, born at Besancon; a man of great literary activity and some considerable literary influence; author of charming stories and fairy tales; “did everything well,” says Professor Saintsbury, “but perhaps nothing supremely well” (1780-1844).

NOLLEKENS, JOSEPH, sculptor, born in London, son of an Antwerp painter; studied in Rome; his forte lay in busts, of which he modelled a great many, including busts of Garrick, Sterne, Dr. Johnson, Pitt, and Fox, and realised thereby a large fortune; he was a man of no education; his principal work is “Venus with the Sandal” (1737-1813).

NOMINALISM, the name given to the theory of those among the Scholastics who maintained that general notions, which we denote by general terms, are only names, empty conceptions without reality, that there was no such thing as pure thought, only conception and sensuous perception, whereas realists, after Plato, held by the objective reality of universals.  And, indeed, it is not as modern philosophy affirms, in the particular or the individual, in which alone, according to the Nominalists, reality resides, but in the universal, in regard to which the particular is nothing if it does not refer.

NONCONFORMISTS, a name originally applied to the clergy of the Established Church of England, some two thousand, who in 1662 resigned their livings rather than submit to the terms of the Act of Uniformity passed on the 24th of August that year, and now applied to the whole Dissenting body in England.

NONES, in the Roman calendar the ninth day before the IDES (q. v.), being the 7th of March, May, July, and October, and the 5th of the rest.

NONJURORS, a name given to that section of the Episcopal party in England who, having sworn fealty to James II., refused to take the oath of allegiance to William III., six of whom among the bishops for their obstinacy were deprived of their sees.

NO-POPERY RIOTS, name given principally to riots in London in June 1780, due to the zeal of LORD GEORGE GORDON (q. v.), ending in the death of near 300 persons.

NORDENSKIOeLD, ERIK, a Swedish naturalist, born in Helsingfors; after several successive voyages and explorations in the Arctic Sea, in which he paid frequent visits to Spitzbergen, where he measured an arc of the meridian, in 1878-79 discovered the North-East Passage by traversing, along the N. shores of Europe and Asia, the whole Arctic Sea from the Atlantic to the Pacific; has written accounts of his expeditions; b. 1832.

NORDKYN (i. e. north chin), the most northerly point in Norway, and of the continent of Europe generally.

NORE, MUTINY AT THE, a mutiny in the fleet stationed at the Nore, an anchorage off Sheerness, in the Thames, which broke out on May 20, 1797, and was not suppressed till June 15, for which the ringleaders were tried and hanged.