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SACHS, H.—SACHS, J. VON

insufficiency of the king's terms for securing the object desired by the Whigs. In the conflict between the Petitioners and the Abhorrers he supported the former, and on the 27th of October 1680 brought forward a motion asserting the right of petitioning the king to summon parliament, and proposed the impeachment of Chief Justice North as the author of the proclamation against tumultuous petitioning. Sacheverell was one of the managers on behalf of the Commons at the trial of Lord Stafford in Westminster Hall; but took no further part in public affair still after the elections of March 1681, when he was returned unopposed for Derbyshire. He was prosecuted for riot in connexion with the surrender of the charter of Nottingham in 1682, being tried before Chief Justice Jeffreys, who fined him 500 marks.

At the general election following the death of Charles II. in 1685 Sacheverell lost his seat, and for the next four years he lived in retirement on his estates. In the convention parliament summoned by the prince of Orange, in which he sat for Heytesbury, he spoke in favour of a radical resettlement of the constitution and served on a committee, of which Somers was chairman, for drawing up a new constitution in the form of the Declaration of Right; and he was one of the representatives of the Commons in their conference with the peers on the question of declaring the throne vacant. William III. appointed Sacheverell a lord of the admiralty, but he resigned the office after a few months. He procured the omission of Lord Jeffreys's name from the Act of Indemnity. In 1690 he moved a famous amendment to the Corporation Bill, proposing the addition of a clause—the purport of which was misrepresented by Macaulay—for disqualifying for office for seven years municipal functionaries who in defiance of the majority of their colleagues had surrendered their charters to the Crown. A celebrated debate on this question took place in the House of Commons in January 1690; but the evident intention of the Whigs to perpetuate their own ascendancy by tampering with the franchise contributed largely to the Tory reaction which resulted in the defeat of the Whigs in the elections of that year. Sacheverell was elected member for Nottinghamshire; but he died on the 9th of. October 1691, before taking his seat. In the judgment of Speaker Onslow, Sacheverell was the "ablest parliament man" of the reign of Charles II. He was one of the earliest of English parliamentary orators; his speeches greatly impressed his contemporaries, and in a later generation, as Macaulay observes, they were "a favourite theme of old men who lived to see the conflicts of Walpole and Pulteney." Though his fame has become dimmed in comparison with that of Shaftesbury, Russell and Sidney, he was not less conspicuous in the parliamentary proceedings of Charles II.'s reign, and he left a more permanent mark than any of them on the constitutional changes of the period.

Sacheverell was twice married. His first wife was Mary, daughter of William Staunton of Staunton; and his second was Jane, daughter of Sir John Newton. His eldest son Robert represented the borough of Nottingham in six parliaments and died in 1714. The family became extinct in 1724.

Bibliography.—Many of Sacheverell's speeches are reported in Anchitell Grey's Debates of the House of Commons, 1667-1694 (10 vols., London, 1769). See also Sir George Sitwell, The First Whig (Scarborough, 1894); Gilbert Burnet, History of my own Time (6 vols., Oxford, 1833); Sir John Reresby, Memoirs, 1634-1689, edited by J. J. Cartwright (London, 1875); Roger North, Autobiography, edited by A. Jessopp (London, 1887); and Lives of the Right Hon. F. North, Baron Gifford, &c. (3 vols., London, 1826); The Hatton Correspondence, edited by E. M. Thompson for the Camden Society (2 vols., London, 1878); Laurence Eachard, History of England (3 vols., London, 1707-1718); and the Histories of England by Lingard, Von Ranke and Macaulay.

SACHS, HANS (1494-1576), German poet and dramatist, was born at Nuremberg on the 5th of November 1494. His father was a tailor, and he himself was trained to the calling of a shoemaker. Before this, however, he received a good education at the Latin school of Nuremberg, which left behind it a lasting interest in the stories of antiquity. In the spring of 1509 he began his apprenticeship, and was at the same time initiated into the art of the Meistersingers by a weaver, Leonhard Nunnenpeck. In 1511 he set out on his Wanderjahre, and worked at his craft in many towns, including Regensburg, Passau, Salzburg, Munich, Osnabrück, Lübeck and Leipzig. In 1516 he returned to Nuremberg, where he remained during the rest of his life, working steadily at his handiwork and devoting his leisure time to literature. In 1517 he became master of his gild and in 1519 married. The great event of his intellectual life was the coming of the Reformation; he became an ardent adherent of Luther, and in 1523 wrote in Luther's honour the poem beginning Die wittenbergisch Nachtigall, Die man jetzt höret überall, and four remarkable dialogues in prose, in which his warm sympathy with the reformer is tempered by counsels of moderation. In spite of this, his advocacy of the new faith brought upon him a reproof from the town council of Nuremberg; and he was forbidden to publish any more Büchlein oder Reimen. It was not long, however, before the council itself openly threw in its lot with the Reformation. After the death of Hans Sachs's first wife in 1560 he married again. His death took place on the 19th of January 1576.

Hans Sachs was an extraordinarily fertile poet. By the year 1567 he had composed, according to his own account, 4275 Meisterlieder, 1700 tales and fables in verse, and 208 dramas, which filled no fewer than 34 large manuscript volumes; and this was not all, for he continued writing until 1573. The Meisterlieder were not printed, being intended solely for the use of the Nuremberg Meistersinger school, of which Sachs was the leading spirit. His fame rests mainly on the Sprucligedichte, which include his dramatic writings. His "tragedies" and "comedies" are, however, little more than stories told in dialogue, and divided at convenient pauses into a varying number of acts; of the essentials of dramatic construction or the nature of dramatic action Sachs has little idea. The subjects are drawn from the most varied sources, the Bible, the classics and the Italian novelists being especially laid under contribution. He succeeds best in the short anecdota1 Fastnachtsspiel or Shrovetide play, where characterization and humorous situation are of more importance than dramatic form or construction. Farces like Der fahrende Schiller im Paradies (1550), Das Wildbad (1550), Das heiss Eisen (1551), Der Bauer im Fegefeuer (1552) are inimitable in their way, and have even been played with success on the modern stage.

Hans Sachs himself made beginning to an edition of his collected writings by publishing three large folio volumes (1558-1561); after his death two other volumes appeared (1578, 1579). A critical edition has been published by the Stuttgart Literarischer Verein, edited by A. von Keller and E. Goetze (23 vols., 1870-1896); Salmtliche Fastrrachtsspiele, ed. by E. Goetze (7 vols., 1880-1887); Samiliche Fabeln und Schfwdnke, by the same (3 vols., 1893). There are, also editions of selected writings by ']., Tittmann (3 vols., 187O-I8i']I; new ed., '1883-1885) and B.- Arnold (2 vols., '1885).» See E. K. ]." Liitzelberger, Hans Sachs (1876); C. Schweitzer, Etude sur' La vie et les azuvres de Hans-.Sachs (1887); K. Drescher, Hans, -Sachs Stmiien (1890, 1891); E. Goetze, Hans Sachs (1891); A. L. Stiefel, Hans Sachs-Forschungen (1894); R. Genée, Hans Sachs und seine Zeit (1894;f 2nd '€d'., 1902)f EL"Geiger, 'Hans Sachs als Dichter in seinen Fastnachtsspiclen (1904). s - » .

SACHS, JULIUS VON (1832-1897), German botanist, was born at Breslau on the 2nd of October 1832. At an early age he showed a taste for natural history, and on leaving school he became, in 1851, private assistant to the physiologist J. E. Purkinje at Prague. In 1856 he graduated as doctor, of philosophy, and then adopted a botanical career, establishing himself as Privatdozeiit for plant physiology in the -university of (Prague. In 1859 he was —appointed physiological' assistant to the Agricultural Academy of Tharandt in Saxony; and in,186'1 he was called to be-director of the Polytechnic at Chemnitz, but was almost immediately transferred to the Agricultural Academy at Poppelsdorf, near Bonn, where he remained until 1867, when he was nominated professor of botany in the university of Freiburg-im-Breisgau. In 1868 he accepted the chair of botany in the university of Würzburg, which he continued to occupy (in spite of calls to all the important German universities) until his death on the 29th of May 1897.

Sachs achieved distinction as an investigator, a writer and a teacher; his name will ever be especially associated with the great development of plant physiology which marked the latter half of the 19th century, though there is scarcely a branch of