SACHS 



SACKVILLE 



63 



the Revolution Settlement and the Act of Tolera- 

 tion, whilst glancing at Godolphin as ' Volpone,' 

 and asserting the doctrine of non-resistance, roused 

 the wrath of the Whig government of the hour, 

 and led to his impeachment before the House of 

 Lords of high crimes and misdemeanours (1710). 

 Ardent crowds, shouting ' High Church and Sache- 

 verell!' and now and then wrecking a meeting- 

 house, attended him to Westminster ; he defended 

 himself ably ( Bumet ascribes the defence to Atter- 

 bury ), but \>y a majority of seventeen he was found 

 guilty, and suspended for three years from preaching, 

 his two sermons also being burned by the common 

 hangman. The ministry fell that same summer, 

 and in 1713, on the expiry of his suspension, 

 Sacheverell was selected by the House of Commons 

 to preach the Restoration sermon before them, and 

 specially thanked on the occasion. A more sub- 

 stantial token of favour was his presentation to 

 the rectory of St Andrew's, Holborn, after whicli 

 little more is heard of him save that he squabbled 

 with his parishioners, and was suspected of com- 

 plicity in a Jacobite plot. He died at the Grove, 

 Highgate, 5th June 1724, and was buried in St 

 Andrew's, Holborn, whence his lead coffin was 

 stolen in 1747. 



See voL ii of Hill Burton's Hillary of the Reiqn of 

 Queen AnneCEAm. 1880); and F. Madan's 'Bibliography 

 of Dr Sacheverell ' in the Bibliographer for 1883-84. 



Sachs, HANS, the most prolific and at the same 

 time the most important German poet of his time, 

 was born on 5th November 1494, at Nuremberg, 

 where his father was a tailor. While at school he 

 learned the rudiments of Latin, but waa never a 

 scholar in the academic sense of the term, although 

 he was a very well- and widely-informed man. 

 About the age of fifteen he began to le;irn the craft 

 of shoemaking; his love of verse also led him to learn 

 the art, almost mechanical, of verse-making from 

 Leonhard Nunnenbeck, a weaver and meistersinger 

 in his native town. On finishing his apprentice- 

 ship, Sachs, as waa the custom of craftsmen in 

 those days, made a tour through Germany, practis- 

 ing his calling in various cities, and frequenting 

 assiduously the schools or corporations organised 

 by the meister finger, who, since the disappearance 

 of the older minnesinger, or minstrels of chivalry, 

 had become the chief representatives of German 

 poetry. On his return to Nuremberg Sachs com- 

 menced business as a shoemaker, and prospered 

 in his calling ; and, after a long, cheerful, and 

 happy life, died on 19th (or 25th) January 1576, 

 and was buried in St John's churchyard, Nurem- 

 berg. 



Sachs's career as an author is divided into 

 two periods. In the first he shows an interest 

 mainly in the occurrences that were then agi- 

 tating Germany. It was the epoch of the Re- 

 formation of Luther, whose praises he cele- 

 brated (1523) in an allegorical tale entitled Die 

 Wittenbergisck Nachtigal, while his poetical fly- 

 sheets (of which about 200 are known ) furthered in 

 no small measure the Protestant cause. In the 

 second period his poetical activity was turned more 

 to the delineation of common life and manners. 

 His poetry is distinguished by its heartiness, good 

 sense, homely morality, and fresh humour. It is, 

 however, deficient in high imagination and brilliant 

 fancy, and contains much prosaic and insipid verse. 

 It was his chief pride to be an honourable citizen 

 of Nuremberg, and his mind and his interest 

 seldom travel beyond the narrow limits of its 

 encircling walls. There is not one of his produc- 

 tions but what was meant to serve some didactic 

 purpose. His best works are Schwanlce, or Merry 

 Tales, the humour of which is sometimes unsur- 

 passable, serious tales, allegorical and spiritual 

 songs, and Lenten dramas. His meistergesange, the 



pieces he wrote according to the precepts of the 

 verse-makers' guild, are now of little or no value, 

 though in his own day they raised him to the first 

 place amongst all his contemporaries. By the 52d 

 year of his career ( 1567 ) as a poet he had written 

 34 vols., containing upwards of 6300 pieces, among 

 which were more than 4000 meistergesdnge, 200 

 comedies and tragedies, about 1700 merry tales, 

 secular and religious dialogues, proverbs, and 

 fables, 7 prose dialogues, and 70 songs, secular and 

 devotional The first edition of his works was 

 published at Augsburg in 1558-61, but that of 

 Wilier (5 vols. 1570-/9) is better. After the 

 middle of the 17th century Hans Sachs fell into 

 neglect and was forgotten ; and he remained so 

 until his memory was revived by Goethe in 1776. 

 His Complete Works were published by Giitze and 

 Von Keller (Stuttg. 15 vols. 1886). The selections 

 of Merry Tales and Proverbs in Verse by Goedeke 

 and Tittmann (3 vols. 1883-85) and by Engelbrecht 

 (1879) can be recommended, as well as Tittmann's 

 edition of the Lenten Dramas. 



Besides Drescher's Studien zu Hans Sachs ( Marburg, 

 1891), there are biographies hy Ranisch (1765), Genee 

 (1887), Stein (Halle, 1889), Kawerau (Halle, 1889), and 

 Schweitzer (in French; Nancy, 1889). English readers 

 may consult MacCallum, Studio in German Literature 

 (1884). 



Sachs, JULIUS, botanist, born at Breslau 2d 

 October 1832, studied at Prague and began to teach 

 botany there. After lecturing at the agricultural 

 colleges of Tharandt in Saxony and Poppelsdorf 

 near Bonn from 1859 to 1867, he was in the last 

 year appointed professor of Botany at Freiburg, 

 but removed to vViirzburg in the following year. 

 There he carried on, in a laboratory built under 

 his own direction, important experiments in plant 

 physiology, especially in determining the influence 

 of light and heat upon plants, ami in investigating 

 the movements and other organic activities of 

 vegetable growth. His Lehrbucli der Botanik (4th 

 ed. 1874; Eng. trans. 1875) and Handbuch der 

 Experimentalphysiolpgie der Pflanzen (1866) are 

 useful and instructive text-books. Besides these 

 he wrote Geschichte der Botanik vom 16 Jahrhundert 

 bit 1860 ( 1875 ; trans. 1890), Grundzuge, der Pflan- 

 zenphysiologie (1873), and Vorlesungen uber Pflan- 

 zenphysiologie (trans. 1887). Died in 1897. 



Sack, a name in common use in the time of 

 Shakespeare, and occurring down to the middle of 

 the 18tn century as denoting a kind of wine. The 

 exact nature of this famous wine, the favourite 

 beverage of FalstafF, and the origin of the name 

 have bi'i'ii much discussed. Sack or seek seems to 

 be simply an English disguise of the Spanish seeo 

 (Fr. sec), applied to wines of the sherry genus, as 

 distinguished from the sweet wines ; a term which 

 we now translate by 'dry.' Canary was often 

 the wine meant by sack. In old churchwardens' 

 accounts sack is frequently mentioned as a com- 

 munion-wine. It seems to have been mixed with 

 port ; and this mixture of white and red wines sur- 

 vived at Douglas in the Isle of Man till at least 

 1887 (Notes and Queries, 1887-88). 



Sack hilt (Fr. saquebute), a name used for two 

 totally different instruments the one a kind of 

 trumpet, the predecessor of the Trombone (q. v. ); 

 the other, the sackbut of Scripture, a stringed 

 instrument somewhat of the nature of a guitar. 



Sacketts Harhor, a village of New York, 

 on a bay of Lake Ontario, at the mouth of Black 

 River, 12 miles by rail W. of Watertown. In the 

 war of 1812 it was an important naval station ; but 

 it has now only some 800 inhabitants, although it 

 is becoming a popular summer-resort. 



Sack villc. THOMAS, Earl of Dorset, poet and 

 statesman, was born about 1536 at Buckhurst in 



