ductions of superior genius are seldom tasted by us, in their true relish, till we become a little familiar with them, and the organic perceptions are accommodated to the native qualities of the composition. These circumstances affect, to a considerable degree, even the silent reader; but the elocutionist much more conspicuously. He who had attuned his organs to the turgid energy of Johnson, would find that it required some effort to slide, at once, into the careless familiarity of Sterne; and he who should attempt to read these two authors with the same modification of measure and cadence, would be as foiled in effort, and as ludicrous in effect, as he who should attempt to give the swelling harmony of Milton to the sententious couplets of Pope, or the smoothe equality of Pope to the varied majesty of Milton. But the cadences and clauses of the verse of Pope scarcely differ as much from those of the historian Gibbon, as do the latter from the familiar rhythmus of Addison's Spectator, or the still plainer and severer prose of Swift. In all, it is necessary to consult the genius and modulation of the author; for his tune will be found to be parcel of his thought; and in verse or prose, his meaning will be marred if his tune be not attended to. But in all this, there is nothing inconsistent with the general principle I have laid down: for in verse or prose, both the meaning and the rhythmus will be best illicited, when the reader follows, with most simplicity, where the collocation and the construction lead. Poetry, however, as I have already said, is the better medium of elocutionary instruction; and tho a few exercises in prose are always scanned and scored with my pupils, as a part of the process of rhythmical instruction,-— principally to demonstrate the universal applicability of the system, yet he who has learned to read, as they ought to be d read, Milton and Dryden, and the verse of Shakespeare, has learned, in fact, to read every thing-that, in the ordinary current of composition, the English language can pre sent. Shakespeare and Milton are not, however, the authors with whom we should begin. They are the pillars of the temple, rather than the foundation. In my own instance, indeed, I may say-I began with Milton. I tasted of his divine harmony in my early boyhood, and my habits of rhythmical utterance, and even of thinking in rhythmus, were imbibed from the Paradise Lost. I had the good fortune to read him in solitude, without a pedant to instruct me, and before I had ever heard of systems of Rhythmus, or the name of Prosody, or the jargon that has theorized him into unintelligible dissonance. But boy as I was, I felt him; and one ardent feeling, caught from the inspiring beam of energy and excellence, is frequently worth whole volumes of technical instruction, even when drawn from the purest source of science. But for pupils, such as mine generally are, who have defective habits to surmount, or dormant capabilities to be developed; and who consequently require the patient process of systematic instruction; and, indeed, for the generality of those who want instruction at all, it is better to begin with models of a more simple and obvious mechanism. The best, I believe, for the purpose, is the heroic couplet of the smoothe, but cold and formal school of Pope-where "Grove nods to grove, each alley has its brother, A few simple rules easily point out, and rivet upon the mind, the mechanism of such verses; and teach the ear where to expect, while the tutor is instructing the organs A how to characterize and form, the heavy and the light poise (the thesis and arsis .), as well as the percussive impulses (▲), and the protracted, or the accelerated quantities. From thence, the pupil may soar to the more varied excellencies of Dryden, the nervous eccentricity of Churchill, and the elaborately varied mechanism of Darwin; proceed thro' the less regular species of rhyme, and thro' the blank verse of Thompson and Akenside, to the true " poetic liberty" of Milton and Shakespeare; thence to the more stately and polished of our prose writers-to the semiversified periods of Gibbon, and the insinuating smoothness of Hume; to the ease and conversational playfulness of Goldsmith; and, at discretion, to the more careless and unpolished writers. But the scholar who would wish to form a style of composition, and attain a graceful elocution, should never condescend to look into a careless, a crude, or a dissonant writer, but when he is hunting for necessary or important information, which is no where else to be found: and even then, he should read him silently, and never suffer the dissonant jargon to strike upon his ear; unless-as a warning experiment, to teach him what to avoid. The writers, also, (not in general very successful,) who have tried new experiments on the rhythmus of our language, are worthy of some attention, from the student of elocution; after he has made a certain progress in the more beaten paths. The Sapphics of Dr.Watts, may at least teach him-how little that learned divine understood of the real nature of quantity, or the genius and capabilities of the English language: in which the genuine sapphic is, I believe, no more impracticable, than in the Greek or Latin. The stanzas of Mr. Southey, inserted among the ensuing selectionstho certainly not what they seem to have been intended for, with a little care and correction, might have been made something scarcely less beautiful and perfect; and some of the lyrical measures of Campbell, have a rapidity, a varied beauty, and a facility, that may help to explain the cause of his failure in the more stately heroic. At any rate, as prose is made up of unequal fragments of all kinds of measures, he who would utter it well, should be familiar with all kinds of varieties, and should seek them there where their qualities are most ascertainable, and their peculiarities are most easily comprehended. He should do more to complete his perception of rhythmus, and improve the flowing variety of his style, he should learn to compose in all: and tho nothing could be more absurd than an attempt to make every gentleman a poet, yet surely a few scholastic exercises in this way, for the sake of improving his sense of rhythmus, and compelling him to look for synonimes, and thereby increase the copiousness of his language, and the facility and variety of his diction, can be no more an impropriety in the English, than in the classical department of his education. It is for this, among other reasons, that the regular students of the institution are made to translate the classics into their original measures; with a strict attention to the distinctions of poise and quantity, and an accommodation of their rhythmus to the laws of both: a practice, it is presumed, by which the study of the vernacular and the learned languages may be made to reflect a reciprocal light, one upon the other, and be rendered mutually conducive to the improvement of the harmony and facility of speech. PRAXIS. IN exercising himself upon these successive articles, the student is expected to scan every cadence into its correct quantity; to score out every passage into its proper bars, with all the regularity of a piece of music; and to read them over, reiteratedly, under the regulation of the time beater,sometimes solo, and sometimes in chorus; sometimes accompanied by the voice of the tutor, and sometimes without such guidance ;-while the critical ear of that tutor, watches every tone and every quantity, not of the cadence and the syllable only, but of every element; so that the liquids, in particular, may sustain their due preponderance of quantity and inflection: which is the only efficient preservative against a tuneless cluttering, on the one hand, and that soporific drawl and drone, or that vulgar sing-song style, on the other, which so often disgust the ear in reading, and occasionally even in speech. Except in some of those cases where the labour is shortened, either by the previous habit of scanning the classical prosodies, the practical knowledge of music, or that nice perception of ear, which is almost inevitably accompanied with a happy facility of organic modulation, the whole at least of the articles in rhyme contained in this volume, should be gone thro' in this manner, with attention, only, to what I have called the abstract rhythmus of the respective passages ;-that is to say, to the mere inherent poise and quantities of the syllables, and the number of equal cadences into which they are divisible, without any regard to the additional cadences-that result either from rhetorical emphasis, or grammatical pause. The blank couplets and triplets of Thompson and Young, and of those who have |