of being uttered in as short a space of time as those which are naturally short.  So that they who speak of syllables as absolutely in their own nature long, _the common cant of prosodians_, speak of a nonentity:  for though, as I have shown above, there are syllables absolutely short, which cannot possibly be prolonged by any effort of the speaker, yet it is in his power to shorten or prolong the others to what degree he pleases.”—­_Sheridan’s Rhetorical Gram._, p. 52.  And again:  “I have already mentioned that when the accent is on the vowel, it of course makes the syllable _long_; and when the accent is on the consonant, the syllable may be _either long or short_, according to the nature of the consonant, or _will of the speakers_.  And as _all unaccented syllables are short_, the quantity of our syllables is adjusted by the easiest and simplest rule in the world, and in the exactest proportion.”—­_Lect. on Elocution_, p. 66.

OBS. 12.—­This praise of our rule for the adjustment of quantity, would have been much more appropriate, had not the rule itself been greatly mistaken, perplexed, and misrepresented by the author.  If it appear, on inspection, that “beck, lip, cut,” and the like syllables, are twice as long when under the accent, as they are when not accented, so that, with a short syllable annexed or a long one prefixed, they may form trochees; then is it not true, that such syllables are either always necessarily and inherently short, or always, “by the smart percussion of the voice, as necessarily made short;” both of which inconsistent ideas are above affirmed of them.  They may not be so long as some other long syllables; but, if they are twice as long as the accompanying short ones, they are not short.  And, if not short, then that remarkable distinction in accent, which assumes that they are so, is as needless as it is absurd and perplexing.  Now let the words, beck’on, lip’ping, cut’ter, be properly pronounced, and their syllables be compared with each other, or with those of lim’beck, fil’lip, Dr=a’cut; and it cannot but be perceived, that beck, lip, and cut, like other syllables in general, are lengthened by the accent, and shortened only in its absence; so that all these words are manifestly trochees, as all similar words are found to be, in our versification.  To suppose “as many words as we hear accents,” or that “it is the laying of an accent on one syllable, which constitutes a word,” and then say, that “no unaccented syllable or vowel is ever to be accounted long,” as this enthusiastic author does in fact, is to make strange scansion of a very large portion of the trissyllables and polysyllables which occur in verse.  An other great error in Sheridan’s doctrine of quantity, is his notion that all monosyllables, except a few small particles, are accented; and that their quantity is determined to be long or short by the seat or the mode