Greeks and Romans based their poetry on quantity” of that restricted sort,—­on such “quantity" as “fate” and “let” may serve to discriminate,—­is by no means probable; nor would it be more so, were a hundred great modern masters to declare themselves ignorant of any other.  The words do not distinguish at all the long and short quantities even of our own language; much less can we rely on them for an idea of what is long or short in other tongues.  Being monosyllables, both are long with emphasis, both short without it; and, could they be accented, accent too would lengthen, as its absence would shorten both.  In the words phosphate and streamlet, we have the same sounds, both short; in lettuce and fateful, the same, both long.  This cannot be disproved.  And, in the scansion of the following stanza from Byron, the word “Let” twice used, is to be reckoned a long syllable, and not (as Wells would have it) a short one: 

   “Cavalier! and man of worth!
    Let these words of mine go forth;
    Let the Moorish Monarch know,
    That to him I nothing owe: 
      Wo is me, Alhama!”

OBS. 8.—­In the English grammars of Allen H. Weld, works remarkable for their egregious inaccuracy and worthlessness, yet honoured by the Boston school committee of 1848 and ’9, the author is careful to say, “Accent should not be confounded with emphasis. Emphasis is a stress of voice on a word in a sentence, to mark its importance. Accent is a stress of voice on a syllable in a word.”  Yet, within seven lines of this, we are told, that, “A verse consists of a certain number of accented and unaccented syllables, arranged according to certain rules.”—­Weld’s English Grammar, 2d Edition, p. 207; “Abridged Edition,” p. 137.  A doctrine cannot be contrived, which will more evidently or more extensively confound accent with emphasis, than does this!  In English verse, on an average, about three quarters of the words are monosyllables, which, according to Walker, “have no accent,” certainly none distinguishable from emphasis; hence, in fact, our syllables are no more “divided into accented and unaccented” as Sheridan and Murray would have them, than into emphasized and unemphasized, as some others have thought to class them.  Nor is this confounding of accent with emphasis at all lessened or palliated by teaching with Wells, in its justification, that, “The term accent is also applied, in poetry, to the stress laid on monosyllabic words.”—­Wells’s School Gram., p. 185; 113th Ed., Sec.273.  What better is this, than to apply the term emphasis to the accenting of syllables in poetry, or to all the stress in question, as is virtually done in the following citation?  “In English, verse is regulated by the emphasis, as there should be one emphatic syllable in every foot; for