[472] It was the doctrine of Sheridan, and perhaps of our old lexicographers in general, that no English word can have more than one full accent; but, in some modern dictionaries, as Bolles’s, and Worcester’s, many words are marked as if they had two; and a few are given by Bolles’s as having three.  Sheridan erroneously affirmed, that “every word has an accent,” even “all monosyllables, the particles alone excepted.”—­Lecture on Elocution, pp. 61 and 71.  And again, yet more erroneously:  “The essence of English words consisting in accent, as that of syllables in articulation; we know that there are as many syllables as we hear articulate sounds, and as many words as we hear accents.”—­ Ib., p. 70.  Yet he had said before, in the same lecture:  “The longer polysyllables, have frequently two accents, but one is so much stronger than the other, as to shew that it is but one word; and the inferior accent is always less forcible, than any accent that is the single one in a word.”—­Ib., p. 31.  Wells defines accent as if it might lie on many syllables of a word; but, in his examples, he places it on no more than one:  “Accent is the stress which is laid on one or more syllables of a word, in pronunciation; as, re_ver_berate, under_take_.”—­Wells’s School Gram., p. 185.  According to this loose definition, he might as well have accented at least one other syllable in each of these examples; for there seems, certainly, to be some little stress on ate and un.  For sundry other definitions of accent, see Chap.  IV, Section 2d, of Versification; and the marginal note referring to Obs. 1st on Prosody.

[473] According to Dr. Rush, Emphasis is—­“a stress of voice on one or more words of a sentence, distinguishing them by intensity or peculiarity of meaning.”—­Philosophy of the Voice, p. 282.  Again, he defines thus:  “Accent is the fixed but inexpressive distinction of syllables by quantity and stress:  alike both in place and nature, whether the words are pronounced singly from the columns of a vocabulary, or connectedly in the series of discourse. Emphasis may be defined to be the expressive but occasional distinction of a syllable, and consequently of the whole word, by one or more of the specific modes of time, quality, force, or pitch.”—­Ibid.

[474] 1.  This doctrine, though true in its main intent, and especially applicable to the poetic quantity of monosyllables, (the class of words most frequently used in English poetry,) is, perhaps, rather too strongly stated by Murray; because it agrees not with other statements of his, concerning the power of accent over quantity; and because the effect of accent, as a “regulator of quantity,” may, on the whole, be as great as that of emphasis.  Sheridan contradicts himself yet more pointedly on