Confusion of Accent with Quantity. — It is a striking fact that Foster, the author of a learned and rather celebrated book intended to clear up this confusion, succeeded in establishing the truth concerning Greek and Latin, by help of ancient grammarians, but himself fell into the popular errors whenever he tried to deal with the English language. Not only does he allege that the voice dwells longer' on the first syllable of honestly, chdracter, etc., than on the two last (and improperly writes them honestly, chdroctir), but he makes a general statement that accent and quantity, though separated in Greek and Latin, are inseparable in English. The truth is so far otherwise, that probably in three words out of four we separate them. As single instances, consider the words honestly, chdracter, just adduced. The accent is clearly on the first syllable; but that syllable in each is very short. On the other hand, the second syllable of both, though unaccented, yet by reason of the consonants s t 1, c t, is long, though less so than if its vowel likewise had been long. The words are thus, like the Greek raiXtv3pos, a cy'lina'er, accented on the first syllable, yet as to quantity an amphibrach ). Until an Englishman clearly feels and knows these facts of his own tongue, he will be unable to avoid the most perplexing errors on this whole subject.
Invention of Accents. —We have already said that the accentual marks of the Greeks were in vented not long after the Macedonian conquests. To Aristophanes of Byzantium, master of the cele brated Aristarchus, is ascribed the credit of fixing both the punctuation and the accentuation of Greek. He was born near the middle of the second century B. C. ; and there seems to be no doubt that we actually have before our eyes a pronunciation which cannot have greatly differed from that of Plato. As for the Hebrew accentu ation generally called Masoretic, the learned are agreed that it was a system only gradually built up by successive additions; the • word Masora itself meaning tradition. The work is ascribed to the schools of Tiberias and Babylon, which arose after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans; but it cannot be very accurately stated in how many cen turies the system of vowel-points and accentuation attained the fully-developed state in which we have received it. There is, however, no question among the ablest scholars that these marks represent the utterance of a genuine Hebrew period ; the pro nunciation, it may be said with little exaggeration, of Ezra and Nehemiah.—F. W. N.