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 (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 bête-noir.
Occleve, (see Hoccleve).
Ockley, Simon OCKLEY, SIMON (1678-1720). —Orientalist, b. at Exeter, and ed. at Camb., became the greatest Orientalist of his day, and was made in 1711 Prof. of Arabic in his Univ. His chief work is the Conquest of Syria, Persia, and Egypt by the Saracens (3 vols., 1708-57), which was largely used by Gibbon. The original documents upon which it is founded are now regarded as of doubtful authority. O. was a clergyman of the Church of England.
