of which he had himself been a member. He was born on the 16th of May 1641. In his early years he was carried off by gipsies and recovered with some difficulty by his family—an incident curiously similar to that which befell Adam Smith in his infancy. He engaged in foreign trade, especially with Turkey, and spent a number of years at Constantinople and Smyrna. Some notices of the manners and customs of the east were printed from his papers by his brother. Having returned to London with a considerable fortune, he continued to prosecute trade with the Levant. His ability and knowledge of commerce attracted the attention of the government, and he was further recommended by the influence of his brother Lord Guilford. During the Tory reaction under Charles II. he was one of the sheriffs forced on the city of London with an express view to securing verdicts for the crown in state trials. He was knighted, and was appointed a commissioner of customs, afterwards of the treasury, and again of the customs. Having been elected a member of parliament under James II., “he took,” says Roger North, “the place of manager for the crown in all matters of revenue.” After the Revolution he was called to account for his alleged unconstitutional proceedings in his office of sheriff. He died on the 31st of December 1691.
His tract entitled Discourses upon Trade, principally directed to the cases of the interest, coinage, clipping and increase of money, was published anonymously in 1691, and was edited in 1856 by J. R. M‘Culloch in the Select Collection of Early English Tracts on Commerce printed by the Political Economy Club of London. In this thorough-going and emphatic assertion of the free-trade doctrine against the system of prohibitions which had gained strength by the Revolution, North shows that wealth may exist independently of gold or silver, its source being human industry, applied either to the cultivation of the soil or to manufactures. It is a mistake to suppose that stagnation of trade arises from want of money; it must arise either from a glut of the home market, or from a disturbance of foreign commerce, or from diminished consumption caused by poverty. The export of money in the course of traffic, instead of diminishing, increases the national wealth, trade being only an exchange of superfluities. Nations are related to the world just in the same way as cities to the state or as families to the city. North emphasizes more than his predecessors the value of the home trade. With respect to the interest of capital, he maintains that it depends, like the price of any commodity, on the proportion of demand and supply, and that a low rate is a result of the relative increase of capital, and cannot be brought about by arbitrary regulations, as had been proposed by Sir Josiah Child and others. In arguing the question of free trade, he urges that every advantage given to one interest over another is injurious to the public. No trade is unprofitable to the public; if it were, it would be given up; when trades thrive, so does the public, of which they form a part. Prices must determine themselves, and cannot be fixed by law; and all forcible interference with them does harm instead of good. No people can become rich by state regulations,—only by peace, industry, freedom and unimpeded economic activity. It will be seen how closely North’s view of things approach to that embodied some eighty years later in Adam Smith’s great work. North is named by Wilhelm Roscher as one of that “great triumvirate” which in the 17th century raised the English school of economists to the foremost place in Europe, the other members of the group being Locke and Petty.
NORTH, MARIANNE (1830–1890), English naturalist and flower-painter, was born at Hastings on the 24th of October 1830, the eldest daughter of a Norfolk landowner, descended from Roger North (1653–1734). She trained as a vocalist under Madame Sainton Dolby, but her voice failed, and she then devoted herself to painting flowers. After the death of her mother in 1855 she constantly travelled with her father, who was then member of parliament for Hastings; and on his death in 1869 she resolved to realize her early ambition of painting the flora of distant countries. In 1871–1872 with this object she went to Canada, the United States and Jamaica, and spent a year in Brazil, where she did much of her work at a hut in the depths of a forest. In 1875, after a few months at Teneriffe, she began a journey round the world, and for two years was occupied in painting the flora of California, Japan, Borneo, Java and Ceylon, The year 1878 she spent in India, and after her return she exhibited a number of her drawings in London. Her subsequent offer to present the collection to the botanical gardens at Kew, and to erect a gallery for their reception, was accepted, and the new buildings, designed by James Ferguson, were begun in the same year. At Darwin’s suggestion she went to Australia in 1880, and for a year painted there and in New Zealand. Her gallery at Kew was opened in 1882. In 1883, after a visit by her to South Africa, an additional room was opened at the Kew gallery, and in 1884–1885 she worked at Seychelles and in Chile. Miss North died at Alderly in Gloucestershire on the 30th of August 1890. The scientific accuracy with which she represented plant life in all parts of the world gives her work a permanent value.
NORTH, ROGER (1653–1734), English lawyer and biographer, was the sixth son of the 4th Baron North. He acquired a good practice at the bar, being helped by his elder brother Francis, who became lord chancellor and was created Baron Guilford (q.v.), and in 1684 he became solicitor-general. But the Revolution stopped his advancement, and he retired to his estate of Rougham in Norfolk, and increased his fortune by marrying the daughter of Sir Robert Gayer. He collected books, and was constantly occupied in writing. But he is best known for his Lives of the Norths, published after his death, together with his own autobiography (see the edition in Bohn’s Standard Library, 1890, by Jessopp), a classic authority for the period. He died at Rougham on the 1st of March 1734, leaving a family from whom the Norths of Rougham are descended.
He is to be distinguished from Roger North (1585–1652), brother of the 3rd baron, one of the captains who sailed with Raleigh in 1617, who projected the plantation of Guiana with an English colony.
NORTH, SIR THOMAS (1535?–1601?), English translator of Plutarch, second son of the 1st Baron North, was born about 1535. He is supposed to have been a student of Peterhouse, Cambridge, and was entered at Lincoln’s Inn in 1557. In 1574 he accompanied his brother, Lord North, on a visit to the French court. He served as captain in the year of the Armada, and was knighted about three years later. His name is on the roll of justices of the peace for Cambridge in 1592 and again in 1597, and he received a small pension (£40 a year) from the queen in 1601. A third edition of his Plutarch was published, in 1603, with a supplement of other translated biographies. He translated, in 1557, Guevara’s Reloj de Principes (commonly known as Libro Aureo), a compendium of moral counsels chiefly compiled from the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, under the title of Diall of Princes. The English of this work is one of the earliest specimens of the ornate, copious and pointed style for which educated young Englishmen had acquired a taste in their Continental travels and studies. North translated from a French copy of Guevara, but seems to have been well acquainted with the Spanish version. The book had already been translated by Lord Berners, but without reproducing the rhetorical artifices of the original. North’s version, with its mannerisms and its constant use of antithesis, set the fashion which was to culminate in Lyly’s Euphues. His next work was The Morall Philosophie of Doni (1570), a translation of an Italian collection of eastern fables. The first edition of his translation of Plutarch, from the French of Jacques Amyot, appeared in 1579. The first edition was dedicated to Queen Elizabeth, and was followed by other editions in 1595 and 1603, containing in each case fresh Lives. It is almost impossible to over-estimate the influence of North’s vigorous English on contemporary writers, and some critics have called him the first master of English prose. The book formed the source from which Shakespeare drew the materials for his Julius Caesar, Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra. It is in the last-named play that he follows the Lives most closely, whole speeches being taken direct from North.
North’s Plutarch was reprinted for the “Tudor Translations” (1895), with an introduction by George Wyndham.
