that produce the alphabetic elements. This has been done by the rule, and with the success of philosophy. On other points their attempts have not been so satisfactory. In investigating the subject of Intonation, that is, the rise and fall of the voice, or what is called its Pitch, they have not designated by some known or invented scale, the forms and degrees of such movements; and thus furnished the required and definite detail in this department of speech. They have rather given their attention to such inquiries as these:- whether the organs of the voice partake of the nature of a wind or stringed instrument; — how the falsette is made; - and whether acuteness and gravity are formed by variations in the aperture of the glottis, or in the tension of its chords. In their experiments, they have removed the organs from men and other animals, and have produced something like a living voice, by experimentally blowing through them. They have carefully inspected the cartilages and muscles of the larynx, to discover thereby the immediate cause of intonation, while they altogether overlooked the audible forms and degrees of that intonation. In short, they have tried to see sound, and to touch it with the dissecting-knife; and all this, without reaching any positive conclusion, or describing more of the audible effect of the anatomical structure, than was known two thousand years ago.

The Greek and Roman rhetoricians, and writers on music, recorded their knowledge of the functions of the voice. They distinguished its different Qualities, by such terms as-hard, smooth, sharp, clear, hoarse, full, slender, flowing, flexible, shrill, and austere. They knew the Time of the voice, and had a view to its quantities in pronunciation. They gave to Force or Stress, under its form of accent and emphasis, appropriate places in speech. They perceived the existence of Pitch, or variation of high and low; and were the first to make an exact and beautiful analysis on this subject. They discovered two forms of ascent and descent in Pitch; one by a continuous rising or a falling Slide; the other by a discontinuous movement, or a skip in ascent or descent. They also ascertained that the former is employed in Speech; the latter on musical

instruments. Though, from carrying the inquiry no further, they supposed, but erroneously, as we shall learn hereafter, that the one was solely appropriated to speech; the other solely to instruments.

The ancients however show no acquaintance with the sub-divisions, definite degrees, and particular applications of those two general forms of pitch, for the discriminative purposes of oratorical use and if we may judge, from an attempt by Dionysius of Halicarnassus to point out the difference between singing and speech, and from some other descriptions, totally irreconcilable with the proprieties of modern intonation, we must believe that on this point, they made but a limited analysis; that the uses of pitch, or of the tones of the voice, as they are called, were conducted altogether by imitation; and that the means of instruction were not reduced to any precise or available directions of art.

No one can read that discourse on the management of the voice, in Quinctilian's elaborate chapter on Action, without allowing to the ancients a power of perceiving many of the beauties and blemishes of speech. Yet among the numerous indications of their practical familiarity with the art of public speaking, we find no clear description of its constituents, nor any definite instruction. The abundant detail throughout his work, more than once suggests an apology for its minuteness; and therefore precludes the supposition that he designedly overlooked any well known means, by which the various uses of the voice might be represented with available precision.

It is believed, the ancient rhetoricians designated the pitch of vocal sounds by the term Accent. They made three kinds of accents, the acute, the grave, and the circumflex; signifying, severally, the rise, fall, and turn of the voice. The existence, in Greek manuscripts, of certain marks, which however were not applied till about the seventh century, afforded the only data, for modern inquiry into the nature of Greek intonation; and created a learned dispute, that has continued, without one satisfactory result, from the time of the Younger Vossius, to the recent days of Foster and Gally.

If Greek scholars had employed other means than wasteful wrangling with each other, for ascertaining the purpose of accentual marks, it would long ago have been determined, whether they direct to any practical knowledge of Greek utterance, or are merely a subject for useless contention. Had the tongue and the ear been once consulted on this point, these symbols, even with the certainty of their alleged use, would have been regarded as vague and meager representations of the rich and measurable variety of the voice.

The disputants found that degree of obscurity in the ancient records on accent, which encourages the profitless labors, and alternate triumphs of party; which subjects opinion to all the chicanery of sectarian argument, and shuts out the conclusive inquiries of independent observation. In the full spirit of the old dialectic art, they 'discoursed about truth until they forgot to discover it:' and while they exhibit a distressing waste of time and thought and temper, by seeking in the obscurity of unfinished records, the light which would readily have arisen on their observation, they hold out to the future historians of literature, a temptation towards the sarcastic inquiry,—whether the writers on Greek and Roman accent were endowed with the powers of hearing and pronunciation.

Since the decline, or the limitation of classic authority, modern inquirers, by listening to the sounds of their own language, have at last undertaken to discover other elemental functions. of the voice, than those represented by accentual marks.

The works of Steele, Sheridan, and Walker, have made large contributions to the long neglected and still craving condition of our tongue.

Mr. Joshua Steele published, at London, in the year seventeen hundred and seventy-five, 'An essay towards establishing the melody and measure of speech, to be expressed and perpetuated, by peculiar symbols.' The design of this essay was suggested by some remarks on the nature of speech, by Lord Monboddo, in his 'Origin and progress of language': and was executed, in part, under the form of an argumentative correspondence between this Author and Mr. Steele.

Future times may smile at some of the effects of classical pursuits, if ever told,—a free inquirer had considerable difficulty, in convincing a scholar, at the end of the eighteenth century, that the English language has those attributes of accent and quantity, supposed to belong exclusively to the Latin and the Greek for this was the subject of controversy. Mr. Steele has therefore given a notation of the time of the voice and shown that the same concrete intonation, applied to syllables of the Greek language, is necessarily heard on those of his own. But his inquiry into the elementary nature of that intonation, was unsuccessful. For if we except his indefinite representations of some new forms of the circumflex accent, we shall find, he made no advances beyond the few but fundamental truths of the ancients. In attempting to delineate the melody of speech, he adopted those leading fictions, and indefinite ideas of the Greek elocution, that the vocal slides are somehow made through enharmonic intervals; and that three tones and a half is the measure of the accentual concrete in ordinary discourse. The influence of these delusions, together with his belief in some fancied analogies between certain parts of the system of music, and the melody of speech, rendered his account of intonation meager, indefinite, and erroneous. The principal design of his work is, to set forth a system of Rythmic Notation, by which the subjects of emphasis and pause may be represented to a pupil; and the habit of attention fixed on these important points in the art of reading.

Mr. Steele shows by his work, that he possessed nicety of ear; a knowledge of the science and practice of music; together with an originality and independence of mind, created by observation and reflection: powers sufficient, when not restrained or perverted, to have developed the whole philosophy of speech.

Had he not begun and continued his investigation through the distracting means of controversy; had not his attention. been drawn into the desultory course of argument; nor his courtesy towards the opinions of others partially betrayed him to their authority; had he not assumed as identical, those points of music and of speech which his own able, and closer observa

tion would have proved to be different; and above all, had he not looked back to the ancients and the dark confusion of their commentators, but in self-superiority to this obstructive influence, kept his full-sufficient and undeviating ear on nature, she would at last have led him up to light.

Mr. Sheridan is well known by his accurate and systematic investigation of the art of reading: and though he improved both the detail and method of his subject, in the departments of pronunciation, emphasis, and pause, he made no analysis of intonation. A regretted omission! The more so, from the certainty, that if this topic had seriously invited his attention, his genius and industry would have shed much light of explanation. upon it.

Mr. Walker, who has written usefully and well on rhetoric and philology, shows in more than one part of his works, that the varieties of intonation were studiously examined by him: indeed, he reiterates his claims to originality on this subject. Mr. Walker may have been the first to apply the confused and conjectural system of ancient accent to a modern language: but he has scarcely gone beyond the limited analysis, furnished by that ancient system. The Greek writers on music had a discriminative knowledge of the rise, fall, and circumflex turn of speech. Aristoxenus the philosopher, a pupil of Aristotle, discovered, or first described, that peculiar rise and fall of sound by a continuous progression, which distinguishes the vocal slide, from the skipping transition on musical instruments.

Mr. Walker does triumphantly claim the discovery of the inverted circumflex accent, or the downward-and-upward continued movement. Yet, if it is correctly inferred from the dates of publication, and from Mr. Walker's rather derisive allusion to Mr. Steele's essay, that the latter author preceded him, he might have found, in Mr. Steele's gravo-acute accent, proof of the real existence of his newly found function of the voice.

Mr. Walker was a celebrated elocutionist, and may have known well how to manage his intonation; but in his attempt to delineate its forms and degrees, he is even less definite than Mr. Steele. His insinuation that music and speech, though but