This page needs to be proofread.
- unexceptionable; and yet his idea of the thing, as he gives us reason to think, was very different, and very erroneous. His examples imply, that, like Walker, he had "no conception of quantity arising from any thing but the nature of the vowels,"—no conception of a long or a short syllable without what is called a long or a short vowel sound. That "the Greeks and Romans based their poetry on quantity" of that restricted sort,—on such "quantity" as "fate" and "let" may serve to discriminate,—is by no means probable; nor would it be more so, were a hundred great modern masters to declare themselves ignorant of any other. The words do not distinguish at all the long and short quantities even of our own language; much less can we rely on them for an idea of what is long or short in other tongues. Being monosyllables, both are long with emphasis, both short without it; and, could they be accented, accent too would lengthen, as its absence would shorten both. In the words phosphate and streamlet, we have the same sounds, both short; in lettuce and fateful, the same, both long. This cannot be disproved. And, in the scansion of the following stanza from Byron, the word "Let" twice used, is to be reckoned a long syllable, and not (as Wells would have it) a short one:
"Cavalier! and man of worth!
Let these words of mine go forth;
Let the Moorish Monarch know,
That to him I nothing owe:
Wo is me, Alhama!" - In the English grammars of Allen H. Weld, works remarkable for their egregious inaccuracy and worthlessness, yet honoured by the Boston school committee of 1848 and '9, the author is careful to say, "Accent should not be confounded with emphasis. Emphasis is a stress of voice on a word in a sentence, to mark its importance. Accent is a stress of voice on a syllable in a word." Yet, within seven lines of this, we are told, that, "A verse consists of a certain number of accented and unaccented syllables, arranged according to certain rules."—Weld's English Grammar, 2d Edition, p. 207; "Abridged Edition," p. 137. A doctrine cannot be contrived, which will more evidently or more extensively confound accent with emphasis, than does this! In English verse, on an average, about three quarters of the words are monosyllables, which, according to Walker, "have no accent," certainly none distinguishable from emphasis; hence, in fact, our syllables are no more "divided into accented and unaccented" as Sheridan and Murray would have them, than into emphasized and unemphasized, as some others have thought to class them. Nor is this confounding of accent with emphasis at all lessened or palliated by teaching with Wells, in its justification, that, "The term accent is also applied, in poetry, to the stress laid on monosyllabic words."—Wells's School Gram., p. 185; 113th Ed., §273. What better is this, than to apply the term emphasis to the accenting of syllables in poetry, or to all the stress in question, as is virtually done in the following citation? "In English, verse is regulated by the emphasis, as there should be one emphatic syllable in every foot; for it is by the interchange of emphatick and non-emphatick syllables, that verse grateful to the ear is formed."—Thomas Coar's E. Gram., p. 196. In Latin poetry, the longer words predominate, so that, in Virgil's verse, not one word in five is a monosyllable; hence accent, if our use of it were adjusted to the Latin quantities, might have much more to do with Latin verse than with English. With the following lines of Shakspeare, for example, accent has, properly speaking, no connexion;
"Good friend, thou hast no cause to say so yet;
But thou shalt have; and creep time ne'er so slow,
Yet it shall come, for me to do thee good.
I had a thing to say,—But let it go."—King John, Act iii, Sc. 3. - T. O. Churchill, after stating that the Greek and Latin rhythms are composed of syllables long and short, sets ours in contrast with them thus: "These terms are commonly employed also in speaking of English verse, though it is marked, not by long and short, but by accented and unaccented syllables; the accented syllables being accounted long; the unaccented, short."—Churchill's New Gram., p. 183. This, though far from being right, is very different from the doctrine of Murray or Sheridan; because, in practice, or the scansion of verses, it comes to the same results as to suppose all our feet to be "formed by quantity." To account syllables long or short and not believe them to be so, is a ridiculous inconsistency: it is a shuffle in the name of science.
- Churchill, though not apt to be misled by others' errors, and though his own scanning has no regard to the principle, could not rid himself of the notion, that the quantity of a syllable must depend on the "vowel sound." Accordingly he says, "Mr. Murray justly observes, that our accented syllables, or those reckoned long:, may have either a long or [a] short vowel sound, so that we have two distinct species of each foot."—New Gram., p. 189. The obvious impossibility of "two distinct species" in one,—or, as Murray has it, of "duplicates fitted for different purposes,"—should have prevented the teaching and repeating of this nonsense, propound it who might. The commender himself had not such faith in it as is here implied. In a note, too plainly incompatible with this praise, he comments thus: "Mr. Murray adds, that this is 'an opulence peculiar to our language, and which may be the source of a boundless variety:' a point, on which, I confess, I have long entertained doubts. I am inclined to suspect that the English mode of reading verse is analogous to that of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Dion. Hal., de Comp., Verb. §xi, speaks of the rhythm of verse differing from the proper measure of the syllables, and often reversing it: does not this imply, that the ancients, contrary to the opinion of the learned author of Metronariston, read verse as we do?"—Churchill's New Gram., p. 393, note 329.
