OBS. 21.—­The following suggestions found in two of Dr. Webster’s grammars, are not far from the truth:  “Most prosodians who have treated particularly of this subject, have been guilty of a fundamental error, in considering the movement of English verse as depending on long and short syllables, formed by long and short vowels.  This hypothesis has led them into capital mistakes.  The truth is, many of those syllables which are considered as long in verse, are formed by the shortest vowels in the language; as, strength, health, grand.  The doctrine that long vowels are necessary to form long syllables in poetry is at length exploded, and the principles which regulate the movement of our verse, are explained; viz. accent and emphasis.  Every emphatical word, and every accented syllable, will form what is called in verse, a long syllable.  The unaccented syllables, and unemphatical monosyllabic words, are considered as short syllables.”—­Webster’s Philosophical Gram., p. 222; Improved Gram., 158.  Is it not remarkable, that, on the same page with this passage, the author should have given the first syllable of “melon” as an example of short quantity?

OBS. 22.—­If the principle is true, which every body now takes for granted, that the foundation of versifying is some distinction pertaining to syllables; it is plain, that nothing can be done towards teaching the Art of Measuring Verses, till it be known upon what distinction in syllables our scheme of versification is based, and by what rule or rules the discrimination is, or ought to be, made.  Errors here are central, radical, fundamental.  Hence the necessity of these present disquisitions.  Without some effectual criticism on their many false positions, prosodists may continue to theorize, dogmatize, plagiarize, and blunder on, as they have done, indefinitely, and knowledge of the rhythmic art be in no degree advanced by their productions, new or old.  For the supposition is, that in general the consulters of these various oracles are persons more fallible still, and therefore likely to be misled by any errors that are not expressly pointed out to them.  In this work, it is assumed, that quantity, not laboriously ascertained by “a great variety of rules applied from the Greek and Latin Prosody,” but discriminated on principles of our own—­quantity, dependent in some degree on the nature and number of the letters in a syllable, but still more on the presence or absence of stress—­is the true foundation of our metre.  It has already been stated, and perhaps proved, that this theory is as well supported by authority as any; but, since Lindley Murray, persuaded wrong by the positiveness of Sheridan, exchanged his scheme of feet formed by quantities, for a new one of “feet formed by accents”—­or, rather, for an impracticable mixture of both, a scheme of supposed “duplicates of each foot”—­it has been becoming more and more common for grammarians