OBS. 8.—­Sheridan was an able and practical teacher of English pronunciation, and one who appears to have gained reputation by all he undertook, whether as an actor, as an elocutionist, or as a lexicographer.  His publications that refer to that subject, though now mostly superseded by others of later date, are still worthy to be consulted.  The chief of them are, his Lectures on Elocution, his Lectures on the Art of Reading, his Rhetorical Grammar, his Elements of English, and his English Dictionary.  His third lecture on Elocution, and many pages of the Rhetorical Grammar, are devoted to accent and quantity—­subjects which he conceived to have been greatly misrepresented by other writers up to his time.[495] To this author, as it would seem, we owe the invention of that absurd doctrine, since copied into a great multitude of our English grammars, that the accent on a syllable of two or more letters, belongs, not to the whole of it, but only to some ONE LETTER; and that according to the character of this letter, as vowel or consonant, the same stress serves to lengthen or shorten the syllable’s quantity!  Of this matter, he speaks thus:  “The great distinction of our accent depends upon its seat; which may be either upon a vowel or a consonant.  Upon a vowel, as in the words, glory, father, holy.  Upon a consonant, as in the words, hab’it, bor’row, bat’tle.  When the accent is on the vowel, the syllable is long; because the accent is made by dwelling upon the vowel.  When it is on the consonant, the syllable is short;[496] because the accent is made by passing rapidly over the vowel, and giving a smart stroke of the voice to the following consonant. Obvious as this point is, it has wholly escaped the observation of all our grammarians and compilers of dictionaries; who, instead of examining the peculiar genius of our tongue, implicitly and pedantically have followed the Greek method of always placing the accentual mark over a vowel.”—­Sheridan’s Rhetorical Gram., p. 51.  The author’s reprehension of the old mode of accentuation, is not without reason; but his “great distinction” of short and long syllables is only fit to puzzle or mislead the reader.  For it is plain, that the first syllables of hab’it, bor’row, and bat’tle, are twice as long as the last; and, in poetry, these words are trochees, as well as the other three, glo’ry, fa’ther, and ho’ly.

OBS. 9.—­The only important distinction in our accent, is that of the primary and the secondary, the latter species occurring when it is necessary to enforce more syllables of a word than one; but Sheridan, as we see above, after rejecting all the old distinctions of rising and falling, raising and depressing, acute and grave, sharp and base, long and short, contrived a new one still more vain, which he founded on that of vowels and consonants, but “referred