Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/368

354 N E S N E S in Eastern affairs. He conducted the diplomacy of Russia throughout the contention which led to the war of 1828 and to the peace of Adrianople. Years passed by, and he grew old in office, pursuing with patience and discretion the ends which Russian statesmanship has always set before itself. Belonging rather to the cautious than the adventurous school of politicians, and attaching great value to the support of the German powers, he viewed with no great pleasure the approach of the Crimean war. He continued in office, however, until its close ; and it is remarkable that a man who was at the head of Russian diplomacy during the conflict with Napoleon I. should have lived to conclude the peace of Paris under Alexander II. in 1856. He died in 1862, still retaining the office of chancellor of Russia, though he had ceased to hold the ministry of foreign affairs. NESTOR, the old warrior of the Iliad, the wise councillor of the Greek leaders, was the son of Neleus and Chloris. He succeeded his father as king of Pylus. In the Iliad he is represented as too old to be of use in battle, but always ready to give advice and counsel to the younger warriors, and to entertain them with long accounts of his own exploits in his youth. According to Homer, he had ruled over three generations of men, and was wise as the immortal gods. In the Odyssey he is described as still ruling over Pylus, where he is visited by Telemachus. There is no real connexion between the legends of Nestor and those of Neleus; but, as the former belonged to Pylus, the legend is bound to place him in genealogical relation with the representative king of the land. NESTOR (c. 1056-c. 1114), the patriarch of Russian literature, concerning whom, however, we have but little information, except that he was a monk of the Pestcherski cloister of Kieff from 1073. The only other fact of his life told us is that he was commissioned with two other monks to find the relics of St Theodosius, a mission which he suc ceeded in fulfilling. His history begins with the deluge, as those of most chroniclers of the time did. He appears to have been acquainted with the Byzantine historians ; he makes use especially of John Malala and George Armatolus. He also had in all probability other Slavonic chronicles to compile from, which are now lost. The labours of the Byzantine annalists, some of which were translated into Palseo-Slavonic, would stimulate the production of such works. Of course there are many legends mixed up with Nestor s Chronicle ; the style is occasionally so poetical that we may easily fancy that he has incorporated bilini which are now lost. The early part is rich in these quaint stories, among which may be cited the arrival of the three Varangian brothers, the founding of Kieff, the murder of Askold and Dir, the death of Oleg, who was killed by a serpent concealed in the skeleton of his horse, and the vengeance taken by Olga, the wife of Igor, on the Drevlians, who had murdered her husband. The account of the labours of Cyril and Methodius among the Slavs is also given in a very interesting manner, and to Nestor we owe the tale of the summary way in which Vladimir suppressed the worship of Peroun and other idols at Kieff. As an eye-witness he could only describe the reigns of Vsevolod and Sviatopolk (1078-1112), but he gathered many in teresting details from the lips of old men, two of whom are especially mentioned, Giourata Rogovich, an inhabitant of Novgorod, who furnished him with information concern ing the north of Russia, Petchora, and other places, and Jan, a man ninety years of age, who died in 1106, and was son of Vishata the waywode of Yaroslavl and grand son of Ostromir the Posadnik, for whom the Codex was written. Besides the historical portion, many of the ethnological details given by Nestor of the various races of the Slavs are of the highest value This interesting work has come down to us in several manuscripts, but unfortunately no contemporary ones, the oldest being the so* called Lavrientski of the 14th century (1377). It was named after the monk Lavrentii, who copied it out for Dimitri Constantinovichj the prince of Souzdal. The work, as contained in this manuscript, has had many additions made to it from previous and contempo rary chronicles, such as those of Volinia and Novgorod. Solovieff, the Russian historian, justly remarks that Nestor cannot be strictly called the earliest Russian chronicler, but he is the first writer who took anything like a national point of view in his his tory, the others being merely local writers. The language of his work, as shown in the earliest manuscripts just mentioned, is Palseo-Slavonic with many Russisms. It has formed the subject of a valuable monograph by Professor Miklosich. Nestor s Chronicle has been translated into Polish, Bohemian, German, and French, but no version has appeared in our own lan guage. Besides his historical work, Nestor was also the author of the Lives of Boris and Gleb, the martyrs, and of the St Theodosius previously mentioned. In recent times the genuineness of his Chronicle has been attacked by Ilovaiski and others, but the accusa tions have hardly been considered serious in Russia, and have been completely refuted, if they needed refutation, by Pogodin. The body of the ancient chronicler may still be seen among the relics preserved in the Pestcherski monastery at Kieff. His work is of primary importance for the study of early Russian history, and, although devoid of literary merit in the strictest sense of the term, is not without its amusing and well-told episodes of a somewhat Herodotean character. NESTOR, the name applied to a small but remarkable group of Parrots peculiar to the New Zealand Subregion, of which the type is the Psittacus meridionalis of Gmelin, founded on a species described by Latham (Gen. Synopsis, i. p. 264), and subsequently termed by him P. nestor, in allusion to its hoary head, but now usually known as Nestor meridionalis, the " Kaka " of the Maories and English settlers in New Zealand, in some parts of which it was, and even yet may be, very abundant, though its numbers are fast decreasing. Forster, who accompanied Cook in his second voyage, described it in his MSS. in 1773, naming it P. hypopolius, and found it in both the principal islands. The general colour of the Kaka is olive-brown, nearly all the -feathers being tipped with a darker shade, so as to give a scaly appearance to the body. The crown is light grey, the ear-coverts and nape purplish-bronze, and the rump and abdomen of a more or less deep crimson- red ; but much variation is presented in the extent and tinge of the last colour, which often becomes orange and sometimes bright yellow. The Kaka is about the size of a Crow; but a larger species, generally resembling it, though having its plumage varied with blue and green, the Nestor notabilis of Gould, was discovered in 1856 by Mr Walter Mantell, in the higher mountain ranges of the Middle Island. This is the " Kea " of the Maories, and has of late incurred the enmity of colonists by developing, they say, when pressed by hunger in winter, an extraordinary habit of assaulting sheep, picking holes with its powerful beak in their side, wounding the intestines, and so causing the animals death. The lacerations are said to be made so uniformly in one place as to suggest deliberate design ; but the bird s intent has yet to be investigated, though it is admittedly an eater of carrion in addition to its ordinary food, which, like that of the Kaka, consists of fruits, seeds, and the grubs of wood-destroying insects, the last being obtained by stripping the bark from trees infested by them. The amount of injury the Kea inflicts on flock-masters, as always happens in similar cases, has doubtless been much exaggerated, for Dr Menzies states that on one " run," where the loss was unusually large, the proportion of sheep attacked was about one in three hundred, and that those pasturing below the elevation of 2000 feet are seldom disturbed. On the discovery of Norfolk Island (10th October 1774) a Parrot, thought by Forster to be specifically identical with the Kaghaa (as he wrote the name) of New Zealand, though his son ( Voyage, ii. p. 446) remarked that it was