OBS. 6.—­From the absurd and contradictory nature of many of the principles usually laid down by our grammarians, for the discrimination of long quantity and short, it is quite apparent, that but very few of them have well understood either the distinction itself or their own rules concerning it.  Take Fisher for an example.  In Fisher’s Practical Grammar, first published in London in 1753,—­a work not unsuccessful, since Wells quotes the “28th edition” as appearing in 1795, and this was not the last—­we find, in the first place, the vowel sounds distinguished as long or short thus:  “Q. How many Sounds has a Vowel? A. Two in general, viz. 1.  A LONG SOUND, When the Syllable ends with a Vowel, either in Monosyllables, or in Words of more Syllables; as, t=ake, w=e, =I, g=o, n=il; or, as, N=ature, N=ero, N=itre, N=ovice, N=uisance. 2.  A SHORT SOUND, When the Syllable ends with a Consonant, either in Monosyllables, or others; as H~at, h~er, b~it, r~ob, T~un; or, as B~arber, b~itten, B~utton.”—­See p. 5.  To this rule, the author makes needless exceptions of all such words as balance and banish, wherein a single consonant between two vowels goes to the former; because, like Johnson, Murray, and most of our old grammarians, he divides on the vowel; falsely calls the accented syllable short; and imagines the consonant to be heard twice, or to have “a double Accent.”  On page 35th, he tells us that, “Long and short Vowels, and long and short Syllables, are synonimous [—­synonymous, from [Greek:  synonymos]—­] Terms;” and so indeed have they been most erroneously considered by sundry subsequent writers; and the consequence is, that all who judge by their criteria, mistake the poetic quantity, or prosodical value, of perhaps one half the syllables in the language.  Let each syllable be reckoned long that “ends with a Vowel,” and each short that “ends with a Consonant,” and the decision will probably be oftener wrong than right; for more syllables end with consonants than with vowels, and of the latter class a majority are without stress and therefore short.  Thus the foregoing principle, contrary to the universal practice of the poets, determines many accented syllables to be “short;” as the first in “barber, bitten, button, balance, banish;—­” and many unaccented ones to be “long;” as the last in sofa, specie, noble, metre, sorrow, daisy, valley, nature, native; or the first in around, before, delay, divide, remove, seclude, obey, cocoon, presume, propose, and other words innumerable.

OBS. 7.—­Fisher’s conceptions of accent and quantity, as constituting prosody, were much truer to the original and etymological sense of the words, than to any just or useful view of English versification:  in short, this latter subject was not even mentioned by him; for prosody, in his scheme, was nothing but the right pronunciation of words, or what we now call orthoepy. This part of his Grammar commences with the following questions and answers: