laureate a tierce of Canary wine annually; and the laureate of the present court, Dr. Southey, receives an annual stipend instead of the wine. We also find wine allowed to the lord chancellor, whose salary was fixed by Henry I. at five shillings per day, besides a livery of provisions, including one pint and a half or a quart of claret, one gross wax-light," and forty candle-ends. We find also the chancellor, Sir Thomas More, drinking three "good large glasses" of sack early in the morning before state business. 66 In the reign of Henry VII. no sweet wines were imported but Malmseys*. The sweet wines from Malaga were called Canary Sack; but Sack was undoubtedly Sherry; although it is difficult to understand how Sherry assumed the lively appearance attributed to Sack+, unless by its being mixed with sugar. Another kind was Verden wine, from an Italian white grape ; Bastard, or sweet Spanish wine, white and brown, was reckoned among hot and strong liquors. In later times, these wines were perfumed, and * In the previous reign is recorded a fatal fondness for malmsey, in the death of the duke of Clarence. Hume says: "The only favour which the king (Edward IV.) granted his brother after his condemnation, was to leave him the choice of his death; and he was privately drowned in a butt of malmsey in the Tower, a whimsical choice, which implies that he had an extraordinary passion for that liquor." + Sir Walter Scott has felicitously said of Sack: "Hold up betwixt you and the light, and you shall see the little motes dance in the golden liquor, like dust in the sunbeam."-Kenilworth. luxuriously prepared for royal and noble tables. Milton sings of That fragrant smell the wine diffused; and Beaumont and Fletcher: Be sure The wines be lenty, light, and full of spirit, About this time medical men wrote learnedly in praise of wine: Tobias Walker, physician to Charles II. undertook to prove the possibility of maintaining life, from infancy to old age, without sickness, by the use of wine; and doubtless Toby's doctrine was acceptable to Charles and his court. "Por The introduction of Port wine is modern; and, about two centuries since, it was so little esteemed in England, that a writer of the time says, tugal affords no wine worth transporting." The custom of drinking Port wine began about 1703, the date of the Methuen treaty, it being deemed impolitic to encourage the vintage of France. Yet, at first, the importation was very small; for, in Queen Anne's time it was customary in London, upon the meeting of two friends, for the one to invite the other to a tavern to drink, or, in a vulgar phrase, to crack a bottle of Claret dashed with Port; which intimates the comparative scarcity of the latter. By the Methuen treaty, Portugal wines were to pay one-third less duty than French wines. In years when the Clarets were strong and plentiful before the war with France, in the reign of William and Mary, five hundred pipes would glut the market; but the average annual quantity exported from Oporto to Great Britain since 1822, is twentyfour thousand pipes, while the annual exportation from Oporto to all other parts of the world has not exceeded one thousand pipes. Of ancient wine-cellars we find some curious particulars in the middle ages they were marked with a cross before the door; and the olden cellar was called the buttery, from butts and bottles being deposited in it: the buttery-hatch was a half-way door between the buttery or kitchen and the hall, in colleges and old mansions. At Haddon, in Derbyshire, we find the beer-cellar to be a large apartment arched with stone and supported by pillars, similar to the crypt of a church; but the wine-cellar was à very small vaulted room; for, when wine was considered merely as a cordial or dram, the stock was not very large; and stock of wine was not laid in as now, by dozens. Drinkingglasses have been found in Roman British barrows, and are therefore very ancient; but Shakspeare makes Falstaff say, "People did not drink out of glass when they had plate." Wine was usually filled out of a bowl into cups. Wine-coolers are also of great antiquity, as they have been found at Herculaneum; but, we question whether any work of ancient art can compete with the magnificent silver wine cooler constructed for George IV.: its superb chasing and other ornamental work occupied two years, and its dimensions are so extensive, that two full-grown persons may sit in it without inconve nience. COACHES. THE derivation of the word coach has not been satisfactorily ascertained; although it has been adopted with but little variation, in all European languages. Nor has it been more clearly determined to what nation the invention of this useful luxury belongs. Its origin has been attributed to the Hungarians, and the name is said to have been taken from the village of Kotzi, near Presburg; whence the coach is supposed to have been invented in that country. We here speak of a coach distinctively; for, carriages of several kinds were in use long before the earliest account of coaches. The most ancient form was the war chariot, of which we find such frequent mention in the early books of the Bible. The Rev. W. Markland, in a laborious paper on carriages, in the Archæologia, says, that chares, (covered carts) hammocks (hung between four wheels) and horse-litters were the most ancient modes of conveyance; in fact, the coach is nothing more than an improvement of the car and caravan. A clumsy kind of car upon four wheels, with swinging hammock, like that just referred to, was employed by the Saxons to carry great personages. Of this rude contrivance the subjoined is a representation. Coaches, or carriages, appear to have been very early in use in England: for, we read of William, third earl of Derby, dying of a bruise, "taken with a fall out of his coach, in the yeare 1253, the thirty-eighth of King Henry the Third." Stow tells us, that during Wat Tyler's insurrection, in 1380, Richard the Second, "being threatened by the rebels of Kent, rode from the Tower of London to the Miles End; and, with him, his mother, because she was sick and weak, in a whirlecote, which is supposed to have been a sort of covered carriage, but was certainly in fashion only for a short time. "Chariots covered, with ladies therein," followed the litter, in which Queen Catherine was carried to her coronation with Henry VIII. The introduction of coaches, or rather their |