vision is therefore particularly
reprehensible in such books as are designed to teach the true pronunciation
of words; for which reason, it has been generally abandoned in our modern
spelling-books and dictionaries: the authors of which have severally aimed
at some sort of compromise between etymology and pronunciation; but they
disagree so much, as to the manner of effecting it, that no two of them
will be found alike, and very few, if any, entirely consistent with
themselves.

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