OBS. 2.—­The object of syllabication may be any one of the following four; 1.  To enable a child to read unfamiliar words by spelling them; 2.  To show the derivation or composition of words; 3.  To exhibit the exact pronunciation of words; 4.  To divide words properly, when it is necessary to break them at the ends of lines.  With respect to the first of these objects, Walker observes, “When a child has made certain advances in reading, but is ignorant of the sound of many of the longer words, it may not be improper to lay down the common general rule to him, that a consonant between two vowels must go to the latter, and that two consonants coming together must be divided. Farther than this it would be absurd to go with a child.”—­Walker’s Principles, No. 539.  Yet, as a caution be it recorded, that, in 1833, an itinerant lecturer from the South, who made it his business to teach what he calls in his title-page, “An Abridgment of Walker’s Rules on the Sounds of the Letters,”—­an Abridgement, which, he says in his preface, “will be found to contain, it is believed, all the important rules that are established by Walker, and to carry his principles farther than he himself has done”—­befooled the Legislature of Massachusetts, the School Committee and Common Council of Boston, the professor of elocution at Harvard University, and many other equally wise men of the east, into the notion that English pronunciation could be conveniently taught to children, in “four or five days,” by means of some three or four hundred rules of which the following is a specimen:  “RULE 282.  When a single consonant is preceded by a vowel under the preantepenultimate accent, and is followed by a vowel that is succeeded by a consonant, it belongs to the accented vowel.”—­Mulkey’s Abridgement of Walker’s Rules, p. 34.

OBS. 3.—­A grosser specimen of literary quackery, than is the publication which I have just quoted, can scarcely be found in the world of letters.  It censures “the principles laid down and illustrated by Walker,” as “so elaborate and so verbose as to be wearisome to the scholar and useless to the child;” and yet declares them to be, “for the most part, the true rules of pronunciation, according to the analogy of the language.”—­Mulkey’s Preface, p. 3.  It professes to be an abridgement and simplification of those principles, especially adapted to the wants and capacities of children; and, at the same time, imposes upon the memory of the young learner twenty-nine rules for syllabication, similar to that which I have quoted above; whereas Walker himself, with all his verbosity, expressly declares it “absurd,” to offer more than one or two, and those of the very simplest character.  It is to be observed that the author teaches nothing but the elements of reading; nothing but the sounds of letters and syllables; nothing but a few simple fractions of the great science of grammar:  and,