290 Music of Speech. [July, 
alone, is stopped in its vibratory path and made to record 
1tseli to the eye: 
These instruments are now too well known to need 
description here; it may perhaps suffice to say that the 
author has with these instruments analysed visibly many 
of the complex modulations of speech, reducing them to 
the principles first evolved by the fertile brain of Dr. 
Rush. 
Of the remaining constituents of expressive speech, such 
as emphasis, full or median stress, &c., it is here needless 
to speak—they are sufficiently well known to students of 
music in their occurrence in the singing voice. But there is 
an almost distinét chara¢ter—it cannot be termed a con- 
stituent—of beautiful speech upon which we must dwell. 
It is rhythm. And again the English reader meets with 
assistance from the character of his language. With the 
French language the case is different. It has, indeed, a 
perceptible variation in the force of its accents, and in the 
duration of its quantities; but not sufficiently marked, nor 
of such a systematic character as to make an available 
prosodial meter.. The French epic and dramatic lines, for 
they cannot be called prosodial measures, properly consist 
each of twelve syllables, though thev have sometimes ten or 
eleven. Among them is occasionally found a succession of 
accent and quantity resembling the various structures of 
English verse. ‘There is an example of anapzstic measure 
in the first canto and second line of Voltaire’s Henriade, 
“* Et par droit de conquéte et par droit de natssance.” 
Allowing for the manner of the French in prolonging their 
syllables many like correspondences to the usual English 
measures may be gathered from what they call their heroic 
rhyme. But all such cases are accidental in French 
versification, and do not accord with the general character 
of its irregular succession—a succession shocking to the 
English ear, and utterly without a flowing rhythmus either 
as poetry or prose. Speech would not be convenient for the 
interchange of thought and passion if every syllable of every 
word were successively accented. For by this uniform 
accentuation it would want that vocal light and shade, and 
that pronounced relief required for a distinct picture of ideas 
—words, and consequently ideas, would not be easily dis- 
tinguished from each other, and speech would be inconveniently 
slow. Whether this slowness would result from the hiatus 
in passing from one syallable to another, each with a full 
radical stress upon it, we need not here inquire. Thus, to 
the alternation of strong and weak accent, with the variations 
