NORRIS, JOHN (1657-1711).—­Philosopher and poet, ed. at Oxf., took orders, and lived a quiet and placid life as a country parson and thinker.  In philosophy he was a Platonist and mystic, and was an early opponent of Locke.  His poetry, with occasional fine thoughts, is full of far-fetched metaphors and conceits, and is not seldom dull and prosaic.  From 1692 he held G. Herbert’s benefice of Bemerton.  Among his 23 works are An Idea of Happiness (1683), Miscellanies (1687), Theory and Regulation of Love (1688), Theory of the Ideal and Intelligible World (1701-4), and a Discourse concerning the Immortality of the Soul (1708).

NORTH, SIR THOMAS (1535?-1601?).—­Translator, 2nd s. of the 1st Lord N., may have studied at Camb.  He entered Lincoln’s Inn 1557, but gave more attention to literature than to law.  He is best known by his translation of Plutarch, from the French of Amyot, in fine, forcible, idiomatic English, which was the repertory from which Shakespeare drew his knowledge of ancient history:  in Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus North’s language is often closely followed.  Another translation was from an Italian version of an Arabic book of fables, and bore the title of The Morale Philosophie of Doni.

NORTON, CAROLINE ELIZABETH SARAH (SHERIDAN) (1808-1877).—­Grand-daughter of Richard Brinsley S. (q.v.), m. in 1827 the Hon. G.C.  Norton, a union which turned out most unhappy, and ended in a separation.  Her first book, The Sorrows of Rosalie (1829), was well received. The Undying One (1830), a romance founded upon the legend of the Wandering Jew, followed, and other novels were Stuart of Dunleath (1851), Lost and Saved (1863), and Old Sir Douglas (1867).  The unhappiness of her married life led her to interest herself in the amelioration of the laws regarding the social condition and the separate property of women and the wrongs of children, and her poems, A Voice from the Factories (1836), and The Child of the Islands (1845), had as an object the furtherance of her views on these subjects.  Her efforts were largely successful in bringing about the needed legislation.  In 1877 Mrs. N. m. Sir W. Stirling Maxwell (q.v.).

NORTON, CHARLES ELIOT, LL.D., D.C.L., etc. (1827-1909).—­American biographer and critic. Church Building in the Middle Ages (1876), translation of the New Life (1867), and The Divine Comedy of Dante (1891); has ed. Correspondence of Carlyle and Emerson (1883), Carlyle’s Letters and Reminiscences (1887), etc.

OCCAM or OCKHAM, WILLIAM (1270?-1349?).—­Schoolman, b. at Ockham, Surrey, studied at Oxf. and Paris, and became a Franciscan.  As a schoolman he was a Nominalist and received the title of the Invincible Doctor.  He attacked the abuses of the Church, and was imprisoned at Avignon, but escaped and spent the latter part of his life at Munich, maintaining to the last his controversies with the Church, and with the Realists.  He was a man of solid understanding and sense, and a masterly logician.  His writings, which are of course all in Latin, deal with the Aristotelean philosophy, theology, and specially under the latter with the errors of Pope John XXII., who was his bete-noir.