In all such syllables the sound cannot be lengthened:  they are necessarily and invariably short.  If another consonant intervenes between the vowel and mute, as re_nd_, so_ft_, fla_sk_, the syllable is rendered somewhat longer.  The other species of syllables called common, are such as terminate in a half-vowel or aspirate.  For instance, in the words ru_n_, swi_m_, cru_sh_, pu_rl_, the concluding sound can be continued or shortened, as we please.  This scheme of quantity,” it is added, “is founded on fact and experience.”—­Bicknell’s Gram., Part ii, p. 109.  But is it not a fact, that such words as cuttest, stopping, rapid, rugged, are trochees, in verse? and is not unlock an iambus?  And what becomes of syllables that end with vowels or liquids and are not accented?

[491] I do not say the mere absence of stress is never called accent; for it is, plainly, the doctrine of some authors that the English accent differs not at all in its nature from the accent of the ancient Greeks or Romans, which was distinguished as being of three sorts, acute, grave, inflex; that “the stronger breathing, or higher sound,” which distinguishes one syllable of a word from or above the rest, is the acute accent only; that “the softer breathing, or lower sound,” which belongs to an unacuted (or unaccented) syllable, is the grave accent; and that a combination of these two sounds, or “breathings,” upon one syllable, constitutes the inflex or circumflex accent.  Such, I think, is the teaching of Rev. William Barnes; who further says, “English verse is constructed upon sundry orders of acute and grave accents and matchings of rhymes, while the poetic language of the Romans and Greeks is formed upon rules of the sundry clusterings of long and short syllables.”—­Philological Grammar, p. 263.  This scheme is not wholly consistent, because the author explains accent or accents as being applicable only to “words of two or more syllables;” and it is plain, that the accent which includes the three sorts above, must needs be “some other thing than what we call accent,” if this includes only the acute.

[492] Sheridan used the same comparison, “To illustrate the difference between the accent of the ancients and that of ours” [our tongue].  Our accent he supposed, with Nares and others, to have “no reference to inflections of the voice.”—­See Art of Reading, p. 75; Lectures on Elocution, p. 56; Walker’s Key, p. 313.

[493] (1.) It may in some measure account for these remarkable omissions, to observe that Walker, in his lexicography, followed Johnson in almost every thing but pronunciation.  On this latter subject, his own authority is perhaps as great as that of any single author.  And here I am led to introduce a remark or two touching the accent and quantity with which he was chiefly concerned; though the suggestions may have no immediate connexion with the error of confounding these properties.