hort and not _believe_ them to _be_ so, is a
ridiculous inconsistency: it is a shuffle in the name of science.

OBS. 10.--Churchill, though not apt to be misled by others' errors, and
though his own scanning has no regard to the principle, could not rid
himself of the notion, that the quantity of a syllable must depend on the
"vowel sound." Accordingly he says, "Mr. Murray _justly observes_, that our
accented syllables, or those reckoned long:, may have either _a long or [a]
short vowel sound_, so that we have _two distinct species_ of each
foot."--_New Gram._, p. 189. The obvious impossibility of "two distinct
species" in one,--or, as Murray has it, of "duplicates fitted for different
purposes,"--should have prevented the teaching and repeating of this
nonsense, propound it who might. The commender himself had not such faith
in it as is here implied. In a note, too plainly incompatible with this
praise, he comments thus: "Mr. Murray adds, that this is 'an opulence
_peculiar_ to our language, and which may be the source of a boundless
variety:' a point, on which, I confess, _I have long entertained doubts_. I
am inclined to suspect that the English mode of reading verse _is
analogous_ to that of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Dion. Hal., _de Comp.,
Verb_. Sec.xi, speaks of the _rhythm of verse differing_ from the proper
measure of the syllables, and often reversing it: does not this imply, that
the ancients, contrary to the opinion of the learned author of
Metronariston, read verse as we do?"--_Churchill's New Gram._, p. 393, note
329.

OBS. 11.--The nature, chief sources, and true distinction of _quantity_, at
least as it pertains to our language, I have set forth with clearness,
first in the short chapter on Utterance, and again, more fully in this,
which treats of Versification; but that the syllables, long and short, of
the old Greek and Latin poets, or the feet they made of them, are to be
expounded on precisely the same principles that apply to ours. I have not
deemed it necessary to affirm or to deny. So far as the same laws are
applicable, let them be applied. This important property of
syllables,--their _quantity_, or relative time,--which is the basis of all
rhythm, is, as my readers have seen, very variously treated, and in general
but ill appreciated, by our English prosodists, who ought, at least in this
their own province, to understand it all alike, and as it is; and so common
among the erudite is the con