it is by the interchange of emphatick and non-emphatick syllables, that verse grateful to the ear is formed.”—­Thomas Coar’s E. Gram., p. 196.  In Latin poetry, the longer words predominate, so that, in Virgil’s verse, not one word in five is a monosyllable; hence accent, if our use of it were adjusted to the Latin quantities, might have much more to do with Latin verse than with English.  With the following lines of Shakspeare, for example, accent has, properly speaking, no connexion;

   “Good friend, thou hast no cause to say so yet;
    But thou shalt have; and creep time ne’er so slow,
    Yet it shall come, for me to do thee good. 
    I had a thing to say,—­But let it go.”—­King John, Act iii, Sc. 3.

OBS. 9.—­T.  O. Churchill, after stating that the Greek and Latin rhythms are composed of syllables long and short, sets ours in contrast with them thus:  “These terms are commonly employed also in speaking of English verse, though it is marked, not by long and short, but by accented and unaccented syllables; the accented syllables being accounted long; the unaccented, short.”—­Churchill’s New Gram., p. 183.  This, though far from being right, is very different from the doctrine of Murray or Sheridan; because, in practice, or the scansion of verses, it comes to the same results as to suppose all our feet to be “formed by quantity.”  To account syllables long or short and not believe them to be so, is a ridiculous inconsistency:  it is a shuffle in the name of science.

OBS. 10.—­Churchill, though not apt to be misled by others’ errors, and though his own scanning has no regard to the principle, could not rid himself of the notion, that the quantity of a syllable must depend on the “vowel sound.”  Accordingly he says, “Mr. Murray justly observes, that our accented syllables, or those reckoned long:, may have either a long or [a] short vowel sound, so that we have two distinct species of each foot.”—­New Gram., p. 189.  The obvious impossibility of “two distinct species” in one,—­or, as Murray has it, of “duplicates fitted for different purposes,”—­should have prevented the teaching and repeating of this nonsense, propound it who might.  The commender himself had not such faith in it as is here implied.  In a note, too plainly incompatible with this praise, he comments thus:  “Mr. Murray adds, that this is ’an opulence peculiar to our language, and which may be the source of a boundless variety:’  a point, on which, I confess, I have long entertained doubts.  I am inclined to suspect that the English mode of reading verse is analogous to that of the ancient Greeks and Romans.  Dion.  Hal., de Comp., Verb.  Sec.xi, speaks of the rhythm of verse differing from the proper measure of the syllables, and often reversing it:  does not this imply, that the ancients, contrary to the opinion of the learned author of Metronariston, read verse as we do?”—­Churchill’s New Gram., p. 393, note 329.