can this proportion be reversed but by changing the accent, and misplacing it on the latter syllable.  Were the principle true, which the learned author pronounces so “evident,” these, and all similar words, would constitute iambic feet; whereas it is plain, that in English they are trochees; and in Latin,—­where “o final is common,”—­either trochees or spondees.  The word ambo, as every accurate scholar knows, is always a trochee, whether it be the Latin adjective for “both,” or the English noun for “a reading desk, or pulpit.”

OBS. 4.—­The names of our poetic feet are all of them derived, by change of endings, from similar names used in Greek, and thence also in Latin; and, of course, English words and Greek or Latin, so related, are presumed to stand for things somewhat similar.  This reasonable presumption is an argument, too often disregarded by late grammarians, for considering our poetic feet to be quantitative, as were the ancient,—­not accentual only, as some will have them,—­nor separately both, as some others absurdly teach.  But, whatever may be the difference or the coincidence between English verse and Greek or Latin, it is certain, that, in our poetic division of syllables, strength and length must always concur, and any scheme which so contrasts accent with long quantity, as to confound the different species of feet, or give contradictory names to the same foot, must be radically and grossly defective.  In the preceding section it has been shown, that the principles of quantity adopted by Sheridan, Murray, and others, being so erroneous as to be wholly nugatory, were as unfit to be the basis of English verse, as are Walker’s, which have just been spoken of.  But, the puzzled authors, instead of reforming these their elementary principles, so as to adapt them to the quantities and rhythms actually found in our English verse, have all chosen to assume, that our poetical feet in general differ radically from those which the ancients called by the same names; and yet the coincidence found—­the “exact sameness of nature” acknowledged—­is sagely said by some of them to duplicate each foot into two distinct sorts for our especial advantage; while the difference, which they presume to exist, or which their false principles of accent and quantity would create, between feet quantitative and feet accentual, (both of which are allowed to us,) would implicate different names, and convert foot into foot—­iambs, trochees, spondees, pyrrhics, each species into some other—­till all were confusion!