38 chapter 1
cians”—Joseph Priestley, William Ward, Charles Coote, and Lindley Mur-
ray—adopt the Latin model for grammar, their disagreement about how to
graphically represent accent anticipates broader disagreements in the nine-
teenth-century about scansion but also about the representation of sound in
text. Priestley and Murray used the Latin macron ( ̄ ) and breve ( ̆ ), which
correspond to the measure of quantities (the macron for a long vowel and the
breve for a short), when they discuss versification. These signs would be famil-
iar to students of Latin who would use them to translate into a metrical grid;
they signified the imagined pronunciation of a dead language based on a sys-
tem of rules of position. Murray, however, used the acute accent when discuss-
ing emphasis in pronunciation. He thus distinguished the vocal performance
of English from its arrangement in the metrical grid and implied that accent
was linked to pronunciation in English more than to a metrical system.
Though the substitution of “accent” for “quantity” in English verse was not
new, the move away from the older macron and breve does indicate that Eng-
lish meter, at least for Murray, would follow a more accentual model. Murray,
Priestley, and Ward also characterized the metrical feet according to the classi-
cal names, and Murray went so far as to give the measures particular characters
(on “trochaic” meter: “[t]his measure is defective in dignity, and can seldom
be used on serious occasions”^50 ). Though Thomas Sheridan was aware of the
disagreements about the various models for English prosody and said as much
in his Rhetorical Grammar (printed with the A Course of Lectures on Elocution in
1762 and the Dictionary in 1780),^51 popular grammars nonetheless continued to
print their various approaches to the measure of English verse, more or less
modeled on Latin grammars, with an increasing emphasis on examples from
English poetry as descriptive proof of their seemingly prescriptive models.
And as English versification became more descriptive it also, at times, de-
parted from the Latin model and gestured to alternative histories. In 1788,
Charles Coote introduced the “Anglo-Saxon” along with the “Old English”
alphabet in his grammar (the “Old English” alphabet actually referring to a
font style), which, significantly, contained “notes critical and etymological.”
Coote’s grammar foreshadowed the inadequacy of the Latin model to account
for English versification, even in a simplified grammar. In a subtle move away
from classical meter, Coote used the acute accent to indicate stress rather than
resorting to the classical macron and breve; pronunciation and not the classical
rubric thus subtly appeared as the proper way to scan a line of English verse.
Though Coote wrote, “a foot is a particular division of a line, consisting (in
English verse) of two or three syllables,”^52 he did not name those feet according
to any Latin model but rather explained verse forms or “species of metre” by
the placement of accent only. For instance, “[t]he heroic metre, so called from
its being principally used in heroic poetry, is composed of lines of ten syllables,
the accent being placed on the second, fourth, sixth, eighth, and tenth.” After
describing “heroic metre,” “blank verse” (“destitute of rhyme”), “Alexandrine