Boston, for which he travelled to India in 1849. After a tour in Europe, he returned to America in 1851, and thenceforward devoted himself to literature and art.
In 1881 Norton inaugurated the Dante Society, whose first presidents were Longfellow, Lowell and Norton. He translated the Vita Nuova (1860 and 1867) and the Divina Commedia (1891–1892, 2 vols.). After work as secretary to the Loyal Publication Society during the Civil War, he edited from 1864–1868 the North American Review, in association with James Russell Lowell. In 1861 he and Lowell helped Longfellow in his translation of Dante and in the starting of the informal Dante Club. In 1875 he was appointed professor of the history of art at Harvard, a chair which was created for him and which he held until he became emeritus in 1898. The Archaeological Institute of America chose him to be the first president (1879–1890). From 1856 until 1874 Norton spent much time in travel and residence on the continent of Europe and in England, and it was during this period that his friendships began with Carlyle, Ruskin, Edward FitzGerald and Leslie Stephen, an intimacy which did much to bring American and English men of letters into close personal relation. Norton, indeed, had a peculiar genius for friendship, and it is on his personal influence rather than on his literary productions that his claim to remembrance mainly rests. From 1882 onward he confined himself to the study of Dante, his professorial duties, and the editing and publication of the literary memorials of many of his friends. In 1883 came the Letters of Carlyle and Emerson; in 1886, 1887 and 1888, Carlyle’s Letters and Reminiscences; in 1894, the Orations and Addresses of George William Curtis and the Letters of Lowell. Norton was also made Ruskin’s literary executor, and he wrote various introductions for the American “Brantwood” edition of Ruskin’s works. His other publications include Notes of Travel and Study in Italy (1859), and an Historical Study of Church-building in the Middle Ages: Venice, Siena, Florence (1880). He organized exhibitions of the drawings of Turner (1874) and of Ruskin (1879), for which he compiled the catalogues.
He died on the 21st of October 1908 at “Shady-hill,” the house where he was born. He bequeathed the more valuable portion of his library to Harvard. In 1862 he had married Miss Susan Sedgwick. He had the degrees of Litt.D. (Cambridge) and D.C.L. (Oxford), as well as the L.H.D. of Columbia and the LL.D. of Harvard and of Yale.
NORTON, THOMAS (1532–1584), English lawyer, politician and writer of verse, was born in London in 1532. He was educated at Cambridge, and early became a secretary to the Protector Somerset. In 1555 he was admitted a student at the Inner Temple, and married Margery Cranmer, the daughter of the archbishop. From his eighteenth year Norton had begun to compose verse. We find him connected with Jasper Heywood; as a writer of “sonnets” he contributed to Tottel’s Miscellany, and in 1560 he composed, in company with Sackville, the earliest English tragedy, Gorboduc, which was performed before Queen Elizabeth in the Inner Temple on the 18th of January 1561. In 1562 Norton, who had served in an earlier parliament as the representative of Gatton, became M.P. for Berwick, and entered with great activity into politics. In religion he was inspired by the sentiments of his father-in-law, and was in possession of Cranmer’s MS. code of ecclesiastical law; this he permitted John Foxe to publish in 1571. He went to Rome on legal business in 1579, and from 1580 to 1583 frequently visited the Channel Islands as a commissioner to inquire into the status of these possessions. Norton’s Calvinism grew with years, and towards the end of his career he became a rabid fanatic. His punishment of the Catholics, as their official censor from 1581 onwards, led to his being nicknamed “Rackmaster-General.” At last his turbulent puritanism made him an object of fear even to the English bishops; he was deprived of his office and thrown into the Tower. Walsingham presently released him, but Norton’s health was undermined, and on the 10th of March 1584 he died in his house at Sharpenhoe, Bedfordshire.
The Tragedie of Gorboduc was first published very corruptly in 1565, and, in better form, as The Tragedie of Feerex and Porrex, in 1570. Norton’s early lyrics have in the main disappeared. The most interesting of his numerous anti-Catholic pamphlets are those on the rebellion of Northumberland and on the projected marriage of Mary Queen of Scots to the duke of Norfolk. Norton also translated Calvin’s Institutes (1561) and Alexander Nowell’s Catechism (1570).
Gorboduc appears in various dramatic collections, and was separately edited by W. D. Cooper (Shakespeare Soc. 1847), and by Miss Toulmin Smith in Volkmöller’s Englische Sprach- und Literatur-denkmale (1883). The best account of Norton, and his place in literary history, is that of Sidney Lee in his Dictionary of National Biography. (E. G.)
NORWALK, a city of Fairfield county, Connecticut, U.S.A., on the Norwalk river, in the township of Norwalk, adjoining the city of South Norwalk in the same township, and 13 m. W.S.W. of Bridgeport. Pop. (1900) 6125 (1023 foreign-born and 189 negroes); (1910) 6945; of the township (1900) 19,932; (1910) 24,211. The city is served by the New York, New Haven & Hartford railroad, by interurban electric lines, and by steamboats to New York. The city has a green with several old churches and some fine elms, a public library, a hospital, a state armoury and a county children’s home. The Norwalk Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution has erected here a drinking fountain in memory of Nathan Hale, who obtained in Norwalk his disguise as a Dutch school teacher and then started on his fatal errand to Long Island. Norwalk has some manufactures, including woollen goods and typewriting machines; and there is some coasting trade, oysters especially being shipped from Norwalk.
The site of the township was purchased from the Indians in 1640 by Roger Ludlow and Daniel Patrick, Ludlow giving six fathoms of wampum, six coats, ten hatchets, ten hoes, ten knives, ten scissors, ten jew’s harps, ten fathoms of tobacco, three kettles of six hands, and about ten looking-glasses for all the land between the Norwalk and Saugatuck rivers and extending one day’s walk N. from the Sound. The first settlement in the township was made in 1650 at what is now the village of East Norwalk by a small company from Hartford, and the township was incorporated in the next year. The village was burned by the British under Governor Tryon on the 12th of July 1779, and the chair in which it is alleged Tryon sat, on Grumman’s Hill, as he watched the flames, has been kept as a relic. Norwalk was incorporated as a borough in 1836 and was chartered as a city in 1893.
See C. M. Selleck, Norwalk (Norwalk, 1896); and Norwalk after Two Hundred and Fifty Years, an Account of the Celebration of the 250th Anniversary of the Charter of the Town (South Norwalk, 1901).
NORWALK, a city and the county-seat of Huron county, Ohio, U.S.A., about 55 m. W.S.W. of Cleveland. Pop. (1900) 7074, including 762 foreign-born and 101 negroes; (1910) 7858. It is served by the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern, and the Wheeling & Lake Erie railways, and by interurban electric lines. It has a public library in which a small museum is maintained by the Firelands Historical Society. The city is the centre of a rich agricultural district. Among its manufactures are machine-shop products (the Wheeling & Lake Erie has shops here), iron and steel, pianos and automobile fittings.
Norwalk was settled in 1817 and was named from Norwalk, Connecticut; it was incorporated as a town in 1829 and chartered as a city in 1881. Huron county and Erie county immediately N. are the westernmost of the counties created from the “Western Reserve,” and comprise the “Fire Lands” grant made in 1792 by the state of Connecticut to the people of Greenwich, Fairfield, Danbury, Ridgefield, Norwalk, New Haven, East Haven and New London to indemnify them for their fire losses during the British expeditions in Connecticut under Governor Tryon in 1779 and Benedict Arnold in 1781. The Connecticut grantees were incorporated in 1803 as “the proprietors of the half-million acres of land lying south of Lake Erie”.
