this subject; and his discrepancies may have been the efficients of Murray’s.  “The quantity of our syllables is perpetually varying with the sense, and is for the most part regulated by EMPHASIS.”—­Sheridan’s Rhetorical Gram., p. 65.  Again:  “It is by the ACCENT chiefly that the quantity of our syllables is regulated.”—­Sheridan’s Lectures on Elocution, p. 57.  See Chap.  IV, Sec. 2d, Obs. 1; and marginal note on Obs. 8.

2.  Some writers erroneously confound emphasis with accent; especially those who make accent, and not quantity, the foundation of verse.  Contrary to common usage, and to his own definition of accent, Wells takes it upon him to say, “The term accent is also applied, in poetry, to the stress laid on monosyllabic words; as,

    ’Content is wealth, the riches of the mind.’—­Dryden.”
        —­Wells’s School Grammar, p. 185.

It does not appear that stress laid on monosyllables is any more fitly termed accent, when it occurs in the reading of poetry, than when in the utterance of prose.  Churchill, who makes no such distinction, thinks accent essential alike to emphasis and to the quantity of a long vowel, and yet, as regards monosyllables, dependent on them both!  His words are these:  “Monosyllables are sometimes accented, sometimes not.  This depends chiefly on their being more or less emphatic; and on the vowel sound being long or short.  We cannot give emphasis to any word, or it’s [its] proper duration to a long vowel, without accenting it.”—­Churchill’s New Gram., p. 182.

[475] Not only are these inflections denoted occasionally by the accentual marks, but they are sometimes expressly identified with accents, being called by that name.  This practice, however, is plainly objectionable.  It confounds things known to be different,—­mere stress with elevation or depression,—­and may lead to the supposition, that to accent a syllable, is to inflect the voice upon it.  Such indeed has been the guess of many concerning the nature of Greek and Latin accents, but of the English accent, the common idea is, that it is only a greater force distinguishing some one syllable of a word from the rest.  Walker, however, in the strange account he gives in his Key, of “what we mean by the accent and quantity of our own language,” charges this current opinion with error, dissenting from Sheridan and Nares, who held it; and, having asserted, that, “in speaking, the voice is continually sliding upwards or downwards,” proceeds to contradict himself thus:  “As high and low, loud and soft, forcible and feeble, are comparative terms, words of one syllable pronounced alone, and without relation to other words or syllables, cannot be said to have any ACCENT.  The only distinction to which such words are liable, is an elevation or depression of voice, when we compare the beginning