a consonant. Upon a vowel, as
in the words, glory, father, holy. Upon a consonant, as in the words,
hab'it, bor'row, bat'tle. When the accent is on the vowel, the syllable is
long; because the accent is _made by dwelling_ upon the vowel. When it is
on the consonant, the _syllable is short_;[496] because the accent is _made
by passing rapidly_ over the vowel, and giving a smart stroke of the voice
to the following consonant. _Obvious as this point is_, it _has wholly
escaped the observation of all our grammarians and compilers of
dictionaries_; who, instead of examining the peculiar genius of our tongue,
implicitly and pedantically have followed the Greek method of always
placing the accentual mark over a vowel."--_Sheridan's Rhetorical Gram._,
p. 51. The author's reprehension of the old mode of accentuation, is not
without reason; but his "great distinction" of short and long syllables is
only fit to puzzle or mislead the reader. For it is plain, that the first
syllables of _hab'it, bor'row_, and _bat'tle_, are twice as long as the
last; and, in poetry, these words are trochees, as well as the other three,
_glo'ry, fa'ther_, and _ho'ly_.

OBS. 9.--The only important distinction in our accent, is that of the
_primary_ and the _secondary_, the latter species occurring when it is
necessary to enforce more syllables of a word than one; but Sheridan, as we
see above, after rejecting all the old distinctions of _rising_ and
_falling, raising_ and _depressing, acute_ and _grave, sharp_ and _base,
long_ and _short_, contrived a new one still more vain, which he founded on
that of vowels and consonants, but "referred to _time_, or _quantity_." He
recognized, in fact, a _vowel accent_ and a _consonant accent_; or, in
reference to quantity, a _lengthening accent_ and a _shortening accent_.
The discrimination of these was with him "THE GREAT DISTINCTION of our
accent." He has accordingly mentioned it in several different places of his
works, and not always with that regard to consistency which becomes a
precise theorist. It led him to new and variant ways of _defining_ accent;
some of which seem to imply a division of consonants from their vowels in
utterance, or to suggest that syllables are not the least parts of spoken
words. And no sooner has he told us that our accent is but one single mode
of distinguishing a syllable, than he proceeds to declare it two. Compare
the following citations: "As the pronunciation of English words i