proportion greater than that of the short.  Hence for a long time it was supposed, as it is by most people at present, that our verses were composed, not of feet, but syllables; and accordingly they are denominated verses often, eight, six, or four syllables, even to this day.  Thus have we lost sight of the great advantage which our language has given us over the French, in point of poetic numbers, by its being capable of a geometrical proportion, on which the harmony of versification depends; and blindly reduced ourselves to that of the arithmetical kind which contains no natural power of pleasing the ear.  And hence like the French, our chief pleasure in verse arises from the poor ornament of rhyme.”—­Sheridan’s Rhetorical Gram., p. 64.

OBS. 15.—­In a recent work on this subject, Sheridan is particularly excepted, and he alone, where Hallam, Johnson, Lord Kames, and other “Prosodians” in general, are charged with “astonishing ignorance of the first principles of our verse;” and, at the same time, he is as particularly commended of having “especially insisted on the subject of Quantity.”—­Everett’s English Versification, Preface, p. 6.  That the rhetorician was but slenderly entitled to these compliments, may plainly appear from the next paragraph of his Grammar just cited; for therein he mistakingly represents it as a central error, to regard our poetic feet as being “formed by quantity” at all.  “Some few of our Prosodians,” says he, “finding this to be an error, and that our verses were really composed of feet, not syllables, without farther examination, boldly applied all the rules of the Latin prosody to our versification; though scarce any of them answered exactly, and some of them were utterly incompatible with the genius of our tongue. Thus because the Roman feet were formed by quantity, they asserted the same of ours, denominating all the accented syllables long; whereas I have formerly shewn, that the accent, in some cases, as certainly makes the syllable on which it is laid, short, as in others it makes it long.  And their whole theory of quantity, borrowed from the Roman, in which they endeavour to establish the proportion of long and short, as immutably fixed to the syllables of words constructed in a certain way, at once falls to the ground; when it is shewn, that the quantity of our syllables is perpetually varying with the sense, and is for the most part regulated by EMPHASIS:  which has been fully proved in the course of Lectures on the Art of reading Verse; where it has been also shewn, that this very circumstance has given us an amazing advantage over the ancients in the point of poetic numbers.”—­Sheridan’s Rhetorical Gram., p. 64.