OBS. 13.—­Dryden appears to have had more faith in the ears of his own age than in those of an earlier one; but Poe, of our time, himself an ingenious versifier, in his Notes upon English Verse, conveys the idea that all ears are alike competent to appreciate the elements of metre.  “Quantity,” according to his dogmatism, “is a point in the investigation of which the lumber of mere learning may be dispensed with, if ever in any. Its appreciation” says he, “is universal.  It appertains to no region, nor race, nor era in especial.  To melody and to harmony the Greeks hearkened with ears precisely similar to those which we employ, for similar purposes, at present; and a pendulum at Athens would have vibrated much after the same fashion as does a pendulum in the city of Penn.”—­The Pioneer, Vol. i. p. 103.  Supposing here not even the oscillations of the same pendulum to be more uniform than are the nature and just estimation of quantity the world over, this author soon after expounds his idea of the thing as follows:  “I have already said that all syllables, in metre, are either long or short.  Our usual prosodies maintain that a long syllable is equal, in its time, to two short ones; this, however, is but an approach to the truth.  It should be here observed that the quantity of an English syllable has no dependence upon the sound of its vowel or dipthong [diphthong], but [depends] chiefly upon accentuation.  Monosyllables are exceedingly variable, and, for the most part, may be either long or short, to suit the demand of the rhythm.  In polysyllables, the accented ones [say, syllables] are always long, while those which immediately precede or succeed them, are always short. Emphasis will render any short syllable long.”—­Ibid., p. 105.  In penning the last four sentences, the writer must have had Brown’s Institutes of English Grammar before him, and open at page 235.

OBS. 14.—­Sheridan, in his Rhetorical Grammar, written about 1780, after asserting that a distinction of accent, and not of quantity, marks the movement of English verse, proceeds as follows:  “From not having examined the peculiar genius of our tongue, our Prosodians have fallen into a variety of errors; some having adopted the rules of our neighbours, the French; and others having had recourse to those of the ancients; though neither of them, in reality, would square with our tongue, on account of an essential difference between them. [He means, “between each language and ours,” and should have said so.] With regard to the French, they measured verses by the number of syllables whereof they were composed, on account of a constitutional defect in their tongue, which rendered it incapable of numbers formed by poetic feet.  For it has neither accent nor quantity suited to the purpose; the syllables of their words being for the most part equally accented; and the number of long syllables being out of all