OBS. 16.—­The lexicographer here claims to have “shewn” or “proved,” what he had only affirmed, or asserted.  Erroneously taking the quality of the vowel for the quantity of the syllable, he had suggested, in his confident way, that short quantity springs from the accenting of consonants, and long quantity, from the accenting of vowels—­a doctrine which has been amply noticed and refuted in a preceding section of the present chapter.  Nor is he, in what is here cited, consistent with himself.  For, in the first place, nothing comes nearer than this doctrine of his, to an “endeavour to establish the proportion of long and short, as immutably fixed to the syllables of words constructed in a certain way”!  Next, although he elsewhere contrasts accent and emphasis, and supposes them different, he either confounds them in reference to verse, or contradicts himself by ascribing to each the chief control over quantity.  And, lastly, if our poetic feet are not quantitative, not formed of syllables long and short, as were the Roman, what “advantage over the ancients,” can we derive from the fact, that quantity is regulated by stress, whether accent or emphasis?

OBS. 17.—­We have, I think, no prosodial treatise of higher pretensions than Erastus Everett’s “System of English Versification,” first published in 1848.  This gentleman professes to have borrowed no idea but what he has regularly quoted.  “He mentions this, that it may not be supposed that this work is a compilation.  It will be seen,” says he, “how great a share of it is original; and the author, having deduced his rules from the usage of the great poets, has the best reason for being confident of their correctness.”—­Preface, p. 5.  Of the place to be filled by this System, he has the following conception:  “It is thought to supply an important desideratum.  It is a matter of surprise to the foreign student, who attempts the study of English poetry and the structure of its verse, to find that we have no work on which he can rely as authority on this subject.  In the other modern languages, the most learned philologers have treated of the subject of versification, in all its parts.  In English alone, in a language which possesses a body of poetical literature more extensive, as well as more valuable than any other modern language, not excepting the Italian, the student has no rules to guide him, but a few meagre and incorrect outlines appended to elementary text-books.”  Then follows this singularly inconsistent exception:  “We must except from this remark two works, published in the latter part of the sixteenth century.  But as they were written before the poetical language of the English tongue was fixed, and as the rules of verse were not then settled, these works can be of little practical utility.”—­Preface, p. 1.  The works thus excepted as of reliable authority without practical utility, are “a short tract by Gascoyne,” doubtless George