7.Fisher's conceptions of accent and quantity, as constituting prosody, were much truer to the original and etymological sense of the words, than to any just or useful view of English versification: in short, this latter subject was not even mentioned by him; for prosody, in his scheme, was nothing but the right pronunciation of words, or what we now call orthoëpy.

They have given him bad prosody, or unutterable harshness of phraseology, for the sake of what they conceived to be grammar.

Greek and Latin verses I did not write, nor learnt the prosody of those languages.

At Rome, the dying paganism had modified its prosody and transmuted its language with Ausonius, with Claudian and Rutilius whose attentive, scrupulous, sonorous and powerful style presented, in its descriptive parts especially, reflections, hints and nuances bearing an affinity with the style of de Goncourt.

What is perhaps rarer than may be thought, he possessed, in its absolute purity, the prosody of his native language, alike in lyric declamation and in the cantabile.

"The mind thus taking a bias under the prejudice of false rules, never arrives at a knowledge of the true nature of quantity; and accordingly we find that all attempts hitherto to settle the prosody of our language, have been vain and fruitless.

Lindley Murray, or some ignorant printer of his octavo Grammar, has omitted this s; and thereby spoiled the prosody, if not the sense, of the line: "Of Sericana, where Chinese drive," &c. Fourth American Ed., p. 345.

He seems never to have studied prosody, nor to have had any direction but from his own ear.

I hope to be pardoned this long digression, thinking it my duty to protest against such a ludicrous method of treating French prosody; I do so both in the name of æsthetics and as a part of my task as biographer of Delsarte.