n it be _easily_ determined how many and what things _ought_ to
be embraced under this head. Of the different kinds of verse, or "the
structure of Poetical Compostion," some of the old prosodists took little
or no notice; because they thought it their chief business, to treat of
syllables, and determine the orthoepy of words. The Prosody of Smetius,
dated 1509, (my edition of which was published in Germany in 1691,) is in
fact a _pronouncing dictionary_ of the Latin language. After a brief
abstract of the old rules of George Fabricius concerning quantity and
accent, it exhibits, in alphabetic order, and with all their syllables
marked, about twenty-eight thousand words, with a poetic line quoted
against each, to prove the pronunciation just. The Prosody of John
Genuensis, an other immense work, concluded by its author in 1286, improved
by Badius in 1506, and printed at Lyons in 1514, is also mainly a _Latin
dictionary_, with derivations and definitions as in other dictionaries. It
is a folio volume of seven hundred and thirty closely-printed pages; six
hundred of which are devoted to the vocabulary, the rest to orthography,
accent, etymology, syntax, figures, points--almost everything _but
versification_. Yet this vast sum of grammar has been entitled
_Prosody_--"_Prosodia seu Catholicon_"--"_Catholicon seu Universale
Vocabularium ac Summa Grammatices_."--See pp. 1 and 5.

CHAPTER I--PUNCTUATION.

Punctuation is the art of dividing literary composition, by points, or
stops, for the purpose of showing more clearly the sense and relation of
the words; and of noting the different pauses and inflections required in
reading.

The following are the principal points, or marks; namely, the Comma [,],
the Semicolon [;], the Colon [:], the Period [.], the Dash [--], the
Eroteme, or Note of Interrogation [?], the Ecphoneme, or Note of
Exclamation [!], and the Curves, or Marks of Parenthesis, [()].

The Comma denotes the shortest pause; the Semicolon, a pause double that of
the comma; the Colon, a pause double that of the semicolon; and the Period,
or Full Stop, a pause double that of the colon. The pauses required by the
other four, vary according to the structure of the sentence, and their
place in it. They may be equal to any of the foregoing.

OBSERVATIONS.

OBS. 1.--The pauses that are made in the natural flow of speech, have, in
reality, no definite and invariable proportions. Children are often told to
pause at