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NOT produced several excellent pictures; but being offered the succession to his father's post, he resolved to devote himself to the artistic arrangement of gardens. He travelled in Italy, and made himself acquainted with the most celebrated gardens there, and designed, it is said, the villas Pamfili and Lodovisi. His first essay in France was the decoration of the chateau and grounds of the minister Fouquet, at Vaux-le-Vicomte. These were seen and greatly admired by the king, Louis XIV., who at once named Le Notre supervisor of all the royal grounds, and controller of the royal buildings, and directed him to make designs for laying out anew the grounds of Versailles. This great work, with its elaborate series of terraces, statues, fountains, and water-works, the costliest and most magnificent of modern times—so costly that Louis is said to have thrown the accounts into the fire that no record might remain of his profusion—was, of course, Le Notre's masterpiece, and it excited the unbounded admiration of his contemporaries. Le Notre obtained in an unexampled degree the confidence of his royal master. He was commissioned to lay out, or remodel, the gardens of the Trianon, St. Germain, Fontainebleau, Clugny, and the Tuileries. Some of these have since been altered, the last entirely so; but others are little changed, and are proofs that the genius of Le Notre was not overestimated by his countrymen, whatever may be thought of particular points of taste. Besides the royal gardens, Le Notre laid out those, scarcely less celebrated, of St. Cloud for the duke of Orleans, Chantilly for the prince of Condé, and many more in France. In England he was employed by Charles II. to lay out St. James' and Greenwich Parks, and his advice was sought by other foreign princes and distinguished personages. By Louis le Grand Le Notre was treated with great affability, and received from him in 1675 the order of St. Michel and letters of nobility. He died at Paris in 1700.—J. T—e.  NOTT,, Major-general, G.C.B., distinguished in the annals of Anglo-Indian war, was born of respectable parentage at Neath in Glamorganshire, on the 20th January, 1782. He entered in 1800 the East India Company's service, and attaining the rank of major returned in 1826 to the Principality, where he purchased an estate. The failure of a bank induced him to resume his profession and return to India. When the war in Affghanistan was decided on, Nott was appointed to the command of the second division of the army of the Indus, and in January, 1841, his head-quarters were at Candahar. As Sale in Jellalabad, so Nott in Candahar maintained the honour of the British arms after the disastrous retreat of the main body of the army from Cabul. In the previous December he had offered to march from Candahar on Cabul, and when at last, in the early autumn of 1842, he received permission from Lord Ellenborough to "retire" from Affghanistan by that route, he routed the Affghans, who endeavoured to bar the way, took Ghuznee (from which, in obedience to Lord Ellenborough's orders, he carried off the famous Somnauth gates), and on the 17th of September effected a junction with General Pollock at Cabul. The honour of the English arms was retrieved, and the English prisoners in the hands of the Affghans were saved. For his distinguished services Nott was made a G.C.B., received the thanks of parliament, and from the East India Company an annuity of £1000. He died at Carmarthen in January, 1844, soon after his return to England.—F. E.  NOTTINGHAM. See.  NOUREDDIN, an illustrious Moslem sovereign of Syria in the time of the crusaders, was born in 1117. He was the younger son of Amadeddin Zenghi, the second of the dynasty of the Syrian Atabeks. At the death of his father in 1146, Noureddin succeeded to the rule of Syria, and began a long and eventful reign. He carried on successfully his father's war against the Latin Christians of Palestine, in a period pre-eminently marked by anarchy and confusion; his sagacious brain, his indomitable will, and his vigorous arm gradually united the Mahometan powers; he thus consolidated his already existing dominions; and, adding the kingdom of Damascus to that of Aleppo, extended at last his sway from the Tigris to the Nile. He has left behind him a character unsurpassed for genius and virtue in those dark and dreary centuries; and the Latin christians themselves have been forced to own the wisdom and courage, and even the justice and piety, of their implacable Moslem foe. Noureddin died of quinsy at Damascus in May, 1173.—J. J.  NOUWAYRI. See.  NOVALIS is the assumed name by which is known in literature one of the most remarkable of modern German mystics, whose real name was. He was one of the sons of Baron von Hardenberg, director of the Saxon saltworks, and was born on the 2nd May, 1772, at the country residence of his family in the Grafschaft of Mansfeldt, Saxony. His parents belonged to the Herrnhuters or restored Moravian brotherhood, so that from his infancy he breathed an atmosphere of religious mysticism. In childhood he was chiefly noticed as a quiet and secluded boy; but with his recovery from a violent illness in his ninth year, his intellect seemed to awaken, and he became an eager learner. From an early age he was passionately fond of the Mährchen, or traditionary tales, so rife in the oral literature of Germany. After a preliminary training at a gymnasium, he studied at the universities of Jena, Leipsic, and Wittenberg. The most powerful intellectual influence of his academic years was that which he received from his acquaintance with Friedrich Schlegel, and still more with Fichte; but he did not devote himself exclusively to philosophy, studying zealously the physical and natural sciences. On the breaking out of the French revolutionary war, he wished for a time to become a soldier. This scheme, however, was abandoned, and at the end of 1794 he removed to Arnstadt in Thuringia, to qualify himself to follow his father's vocation. Here he fell in love with "Sophia von K.," a girl of fourteen, described as of the most angelic and spiritual beauty. He had been appointed auditor in the department of which his father was director, when the death of his loved one and of a younger brother coming together in the spring of 1797 violently affected him, and threw him into the state of mind mirrored in his mournful and beautiful "Hymns to the Night." He recovered to some extent from the shock, and went to Freyberg to study mineralogy under Werner. Here he began one of the most remarkable of his works, the "Disciples at Sais" (Lehrlinge zu Sais), which remained a fragment, but which he intended to be a "physical romance." At Freyberg he fell in love again with a young lady, a "Julia von Ch.," and to her engaged himself in marriage. Visiting Jena, he made the acquaintance of Friedrich Schlegel's brother, August Wilhelm of Tieck, afterwards his biographer, and of Wackenroder, and associated himself with them in their championship of the new romantic school of thought and poetry. His first appearance in print with his "Hymns to the Night" and his "Blüthenstaub" was made in his friend Friedrich Schlegel's Musen-Almanack. For a short time he lived in solitude in Thuringia, busy with the composition of his aërial and mystical romance, "Heinrich von Oftendingen." In a few months he was to be married, and all was ready for the event, when he began to spit blood. Consumption rapidly mastered him, and he died on the 19th of March, 1801, in his twenty-ninth year. His "Schriften" were edited by his friends Tieck and Friedrich Schlegel, with a graceful and affectionate memoir of their author by the former. Besides the pieces already mentioned, they contain, in the form chiefly of aphorisms, fragments of a grand encyclopædic work, in which he intended to trace the interdependence of the sciences. There is a fine paper on Novalis, with translated extracts from his writings, in Carlyle's Miscellanies, where he is called the "German Pascal," "the ideal of an antique gymnosophist." An English translation of his "Heinrich von Oftendingen" was published at Cambridge, U.S., in 1842; and of his profound "Christianity in Europe," in the Catholic Series, London, 1844.—F. E.  NOVATUS or NOVATIAN, the author of the Novatian schism in the Church of Rome in the third century, was a presbyter of that church, distinguished for ability, theological learning, and moral earnestness. The place and the date of his birth are not known. It is probable that before his conversion to Christianity, he had been trained in the philosophy of the stoics, and that the stern principles of that school predisposed him to take side, after his baptism, with that large party of the church, both in the East and West, who were in favour of a stringent administration of discipline in the case of those who had fallen into apostasy, adultery, or other gross sin. The strictness of his disciplinary views and the earnestness with which he enforced them, made him a great favourite in Rome with those who had themselves been faithful sufferers and confessors, but caused him to be disliked by the majority of his copresbyters, who were in favour of a laxer discipline and a more accommodating policy. After the martyrdom of Bishop 