The quantity of our unaccented syllables, none of these authors, except Allen, thought it worth his while to notice.  But among their accented syllables, they all include words of one syllable, though most of them thereby pointedly contradict their own definitions of accent.  To find in our language no short syllables but such as are accented, is certainly a very strange and very great oversight.  Frazee says, “The pronunciation of an accented syllable requires double the time of that of an unaccented one.”—­Frazee’s Improved Gram., p. 180.  If so, our poetical quantities are greatly misrepresented by the rules above cited.  Allen truly says, “Unaccented syllables are generally short; as, r~eturn, turn~er.”—­ Elements of E. Gram., p. 222.  But how it was ever found out, that in these words we accent only the vowel u, and in such as hunter and bluntly, some one of the consonants only, he does not inform us.

OBS. 17.—­As might be expected, it is not well agreed among those who accent single consonants and vowels, what particular letter should receive the stress and the mark.  The word or syllable “ant,” for example, is marked “ant” by Alger, Bacon, and others, to enforce the n; “ant” by Frost, Putnam, and others, to enforce the t; “ant” by Murray, Russell, and others, to show, as they say, “_the accent on the consonant_!” But, in “ANTLER,” Dr. Johnson accented the _a_; and, to mark the same pronunciation, Worcester now writes, “ANTLER;” while almost any prosodist, in scanning, would mark this word “_~antl~er_” and call it a trochee.[498] Churchill, who is in general a judicious observer, writes thus:  “The leading feature in the English language, on which it’s melody both in prose and verse chiefly depends, is it’s accent.  Every word in it of more than one syllable has one of it’s syllables distinguished by this from the rest; the accent being in some cases on the vowel, in others on the consonant that closes the syllable; on the vowel, when it has it’s long sound; on the consonant, when the vowel is short.”—­Churchill’s New Gram., p. 181.  But to this, as a rule of accentuation, no attention is in fact paid nowadays.  Syllables that have long vowels not final, very properly take the sign of stress on or after a consonant or a mute vowel; as, =angel, ch=amber, sl=ayer, b=eadroll, sl=eazy, sl=e=eper, sl=e=eveless, l=ively, m=indful, sl=ightly, sl=iding, b=oldness, gr=ossly, wh=olly, =useless.—­See Worcester’s Dict.

OBS. 18.—­It has been seen, that Murray’s principles of quantity were greatly altered by himself, after the first appearance of his grammar.  To have a full and correct view of them, it is necessary to notice something more than his main text, as revised, with which all his amenders content themselves, and which he himself thought sufficient for his Abridgement.  The following positions, which, in some of his revisals, he added to the large grammar, are therefore cited:—­