of each,” “which they had not” we are encumbered with an enormous surplus; for, of the twenty-eight Latin feet,[502] mentioned by Dr. Adam and others, Murray never gave the names of more than eight, and his early editions acknowledged but four, and these single, not “duplicates”—­unigenous, not severally of “two species.”  Fourthly, to suppose a multiplicity of feet to be “a copious stock of materials” for versification, is as absurd as to imagine, in any other case, a variety of measures to be materials for producing the thing measured.  Fifthly, “our heroic measure” is iambic pentameter, as Murray himself shows; and, to give to this, “all the ancient poetic feet,” is to bestow most of them where they are least needed.  Sixthly, “feet differing in measure,” so as to “make different impressions on the ear,” cannot well be said to “agree in movement,” or to be “exactly of the same nature!”

OBS. 7.—­Of the foundation of metre, Wells has the following account:  “The quantity of a syllable is the relative time occupied in its pronunciation.  A syllable may be long in quantity, as fate; or short, as let.  The Greeks and Romans based their poetry on the quantity of syllables; but modern versification depends chiefly upon accent, the quantity of syllables being almost wholly disregarded.”—­School Gram., 1st Ed., p. 185.  Again:  “Versification is a measured arrangement of words[,] in which the accent is made to recur at certain regular intervals.  This definition applies only to modern verse.  In Greek and Latin poetry, it is the regular recurrence of long syllables, according to settled laws, which constitutes verse.”—­Ib., p. 186.  The contrasting of ancient and modern versification, since Sheridan and Murray each contrived an example of it, has become very common in our grammars, though not in principle very uniform; and, however needless where a correct theory prevails, it is, to such views of accent and quantity as were adopted by these authors, and by Walker, or their followers, but a necessary counterpart.  The notion, however, that English verse has less regard to quantity than had that of the old Greeks or Romans, is a mere assumption, originating in a false idea of what quantity is; and, that Greek or Latin verse was less accentual than is ours, is another assumption, left proofless too, of what many authors disbelieve and contradict.  Wells’s definition of quantity is similar to mine, and perhaps unexceptionable; and yet his idea of the thing, as he gives us reason to think, was very different, and very erroneous.  His examples imply, that, like Walker, he had “no conception of quantity arising from any thing but the nature of the vowels,”—­no conception of a long or a short syllable without what is called a long or a short vowel sound.  That “the