e of the rhythmic art be in no degree
advanced by their productions, new or old. For the supposition is, that in
general the consulters of these various oracles are persons more fallible
still, and therefore likely to be misled by any errors that are not
expressly pointed out to them. In this work, it is assumed, that
_quantity_, not laboriously ascertained by "a great variety of rules
applied from the Greek and Latin Prosody," but discriminated on principles
of our own--_quantity_, dependent in some degree on the nature and number
of the letters in a syllable, but still more on the presence or absence of
stress--is the true foundation of our metre. It has already been stated,
and perhaps proved, that this theory is as well supported by authority as
any; but, since Lindley Murray, persuaded wrong by the positiveness of
Sheridan, exchanged his scheme of feet formed by quantities, for a new one
of "feet formed by accents"--or, rather, for an impracticable mixture of
both, a scheme of supposed "_duplicates_ of each foot"--it has been
becoming more and more common for grammarians to represent the basis of
English versification to be, not the distinction of long and short
quantities, but the recurrence of _accent_ at certain intervals. Such is
the doctrine of Butler, Felton, Fowler, S. S. Greene, Hart, Hiley, R. C.
Smith, Weld, Wells, and perhaps others. But, in this, all these writers
contradict themselves; disregard their own definitions of accent; count
monosyllables to be accented or unaccented; displace emphasis from the rank
which Murray and others give it, as "the great regulator of quantity;" and
suppose the length or shortness of syllables not to depend on the presence
or absence of either accent or emphasis; and not to be of much account in
the construction of English verse. As these strictures are running to a
great length, it may be well now to introduce the poetic feet, and to
reserve, for notes under that head, any further examination of opinions as
to what constitutes the _foundation_ of verse.

SECTION III.--OF POETIC FEET.

A verse, or line of poetry., consists of successive combinations of
syllables, called _feet_. A poetic _foot_, in English, consists either of
two or of three syllables, as in the following examples:

1. "C=an t=y | -r~ants b=ut | b~y t=y | -r~ants c=on | -qu~ered
b=e?"--_Byron_.

2. "H=ol~y, | h=ol~y, | h=ol~y! | =all th~e | s=aints ~a