OBS. 3.—­If, in regard to the subjects which may be treated under the name of Prosody, “the usage of modern grammarians justifies an extremely general application of the term,” such an application is certainly not less warranted by the usage of old authors.  But, by the practice of neither, can it be easily determined how many and what things ought to be embraced under this head.  Of the different kinds of verse, or “the structure of Poetical Compostion,” some of the old prosodists took little or no notice; because they thought it their chief business, to treat of syllables, and determine the orthoepy of words.  The Prosody of Smetius, dated 1509, (my edition of which was published in Germany in 1691,) is in fact a pronouncing dictionary of the Latin language.  After a brief abstract of the old rules of George Fabricius concerning quantity and accent, it exhibits, in alphabetic order, and with all their syllables marked, about twenty-eight thousand words, with a poetic line quoted against each, to prove the pronunciation just.  The Prosody of John Genuensis, an other immense work, concluded by its author in 1286, improved by Badius in 1506, and printed at Lyons in 1514, is also mainly a Latin dictionary, with derivations and definitions as in other dictionaries.  It is a folio volume of seven hundred and thirty closely-printed pages; six hundred of which are devoted to the vocabulary, the rest to orthography, accent, etymology, syntax, figures, points—­almost everything but versification.  Yet this vast sum of grammar has been entitled Prosody—­“Prosodia seu Catholicon”—­“Catholicon seu Universale Vocabularium ac Summa Grammatices.”—­See pp. 1 and 5.

CHAPTER I—­PUNCTUATION.

Punctuation is the art of dividing literary composition, by points, or stops, for the purpose of showing more clearly the sense and relation of the words; and of noting the different pauses and inflections required in reading.

The following are the principal points, or marks; namely, the Comma [,], the Semicolon [;], the Colon [:], the Period [.], the Dash [—­], the Eroteme, or Note of Interrogation [?], the Ecphoneme, or Note of Exclamation [!], and the Curves, or Marks of Parenthesis, [()].

The Comma denotes the shortest pause; the Semicolon, a pause double that of the comma; the Colon, a pause double that of the semicolon; and the Period, or Full Stop, a pause double that of the colon.  The pauses required by the other four, vary according to the structure of the sentence, and their place in it.  They may be equal to any of the foregoing.

OBSERVATIONS.

OBS. 1.—­The pauses that are made in the natural flow of speech, have, in reality, no definite and invariable proportions.  Children are often told to pause at a comma while they might count one; at a semicolon, one, two; at a colon, one, two, three; at a period, one, two, three, four.  This may be of some use, as teaching them to observe the necessary stops, that they may catch the sense; but the standard itself is variable, and so are the times which good sense gives to the points.  As a final stop, the period is immeasurable; and so may be the pause after a question or an exclamation.