a wine used by our ancestors, which some have taken to be Rhenish and some Canary wine. Venner, in his Via Recta ad Vitam Longam, printed in 1628, says that sack is "completely not in the third degree, and that some affect to drink sack with sugar and some without; and upon no other ground, as I think, but as it is best pleasing to their palate." He goes on to say, "that sack, taken by itself, is very hot and very penetrative; being taken with sugar, the heat is both somewhat allayed, and the penetrative quality thereof also retarded." He adds further, that Rhenish declines after a twelvemonth, but sack and the other stronger wines are best after they are two or three years old. It appears to be highly probable that sack was not a sweet wine, from its being taken with sugar; and that it did not receive its name from having a saccharine flavour, but from its being originally stored in sacks or bozachios. It does not appear to have been a French wine, but a strong wine, the production of a hot climate. Probably it was what is called dry mountain, or some Spanish wine of that kind. This conjecture is the more plausible, as Howell, in his French and English Dictionary, printed in the year 1650, translates sack by the words "vin d'Espanne, vin sec."