18 



ACARNANIA ACCENT. 



a Ion" time, nre a natural obstacle, which renders ;i 

 _, from Cullao to Acapulco more difficult, ami 

 often longer, tlian one from Callao to Cadiz. Steam- 

 bouts would be of great advantage in this <iuarU>r. 

 in order to take advantage of the trade-winds, it is 

 -p. -dully necessary to keep at a distance from the 

 line. Tills however, is impracticable on a coasting 

 voyage from Acapulco to Culluo. The exports 

 hitherto, from Acapulco have been mostly silver, 

 indigo, cochineal, Spanish cloth, and some peltry, 

 which comes from California and the northern part 

 i if Mexico. The imports consist of all the valuable 

 productions of Asia. 



ACARXAMA, now called // Carnia and // Despo- 

 tato ; an ancient country of Epirus, divided from 

 /Etolia by the Achelous. 



ACATHOLICI are, in general, those who do not be- 

 long to the catholic church. In certain catholic 

 countries, protestants are distinguished by this 

 namr, which is considered less odious. 



ACCENT ; the law which regulates the rising and 

 felling of sounds or tones. Music and language, 

 \\hieh are subject to this law, both originate in the 

 feelings ; and although they at last separate from 

 each other, and music remains the language of the 

 heart, while speech, or language, properly so called, 

 becomes the language of the mind, yet the latter 

 does not entirely cease to speak to the heart ; and 

 music and language thus retain certain qualities in 

 common ; these are partly internal and partly ex- 

 ternal. Both are adapted to the expression of emo- 

 tions ; and thence arise the movements, sometimes 

 slow and sometimes quick, which we perceive in 

 them. They thus become subject to quantity or 

 time ; and we distinguish sounds, with reference to 

 quantity, into long and short. In order to express 

 an emotion distinctly and plainly, there must be a 

 suitable arrangement of the organs for the sounds 

 intended to be produced ; for, in a series of sounds 

 measured by the relation of time, and regulated also 

 by relation to some fundamental tone, there will be 

 found a certain connexion and association which re- 

 present the emotions in their various relations and 

 gradations ; it is this also, which distinguishes cor- 

 rectly what is of primary importance from what is 

 secondary, renders the unimportant subordinate to 

 the important, and gives proper weight to that which 

 is significant. A succession of tones thus becomes 

 a musical composition, which comprehends within it- 

 self a definite meaning or sense ; and, to express 

 this, particular regard must be had to the significa- 

 tion and importance of single tones in connexion. 

 The stress, which is laid on the tones, according to 

 the gradations of meaning, constitutes what we call 

 accent. We distinguish the acute, or rising accent, 

 the grave, or falling, and the circumflex. The cir- 

 tumflex accent fells on those syllables or tones which 

 are long in themselves ; the grave properly denotes 

 merely the absence of any stress ; and thus we have 

 only the acute left, to give a designation to tones. 

 The reasons for designating a tone by accent, and 

 dwelling on it longer than its established quantity 

 requires, are either mechanical, rhythmical, or em- 

 phatical. We divide accent into grammatical and 

 rhetorical, or the accent of words and of sentences, 

 which last is called emphasis. The former rests on 

 physical or mechanical causes ; the latter has for its 

 object the relations of ideas. The laws which gov- 

 ern both are briefly the following : A syllable or 

 tone of the natural length receives the grammatical 

 or verbal accent ; but there are two causes, which 

 distinguish some syllables of a word from the rest 

 their mechanical formation and their signification. 

 In the word ttrengthen, for instance, mechanical 

 causes compel the voice to dwell longer on the first 



syllable tlian on the second, and hence a greater 

 MI-CVS is l;iid on that s\ liable. Rhetorical accent, or 

 emphasis, i-, designed to give to a sentence distinct- 

 ness and clearness. In a sentence, therefore, the 

 stress is laid on the most important word, and in a 

 word (in the most important syllable. Without at- 

 tarhing itself, in language, to the quantity of a 

 won!, or, in music, to a certain jiart of a bar, 

 the accentual force dwells on the important part ; 

 and, in order that this force may be rendered 

 still more distinguishable, it havens over those 

 parts which, though otherwise important, the con- 

 text renders comparatively unimportant. It follows, 

 from what has been said, that t lie accent of words 

 and the accent of sentences, or emphasis, may be 

 united or separated at pleasure. It may now be. 

 asked, whether emphasis destroys verluil accent, and 

 Quantity ; and whether, for this reason, euphony 

 does not suffer from emphasis ? In answering this 

 question, (in which lies the secret of prosody in gen- 

 eral, and the difference between the modern and 

 ancient), four points come nnder consideration : 1. If 

 the accent coincides with a syllable which is long 

 from mechanical causes, it elevates the syllable, and 

 imparts stress to its prosodial length. 2. The ac- 

 cent does not render an invariably long syllable 

 short, but deprives it, if it immediately follow the 

 accented syllable, of a portion of its length. The 

 quantity, therefore, if it does not coincide with the 

 accent, may be somewhat weakened by it. 3. Al- 

 though the accent cannot render an invariably long 

 syllable short, it can change the relative quantity of 

 common syllables. 4. The accent can never fell on 

 syllables invariably short. These are the rules 

 which are of the greatest importance, not only to the 

 versifier, but also to the declaimer, and to the actor, 

 so far as he is a declaimer. 



The grammatical and rhetorical nomenclature of 

 the English language is very defective and unsettled ; 

 and hence has arisen a great degree of confusion 

 among all our writers on the subject of accent and 

 quantity in English. We have perverted the true 

 meaning of long and short, as applied to syllables 

 or vowels ; and, by our particular application of those 

 terms, we have made ourselves quite unintelligible 

 to foreign nations, who still use them according to 

 their signification in the ancient languages, from 

 which they are derived. An English writer of some 

 celebrity, (Foster on Accent and Quantity,) whose 

 own work, however, is not free from obscurity, 

 observes, that he has found the word accent used 

 by the same writer in four different senses some- 

 times expressing elevation, sometimes prolongation 

 of sound, sometimes a stress of voice compounded of 

 the other two, and sometimes the artificial accentual 

 mark. For a long series of years, however, accent, 

 as Johnson has remarked, in English prosody has 

 been the same thing with quantity ; and another 

 English writer of celebrity, bishop Horsley, observes, 

 that it is a peculiarity of the English language, that 

 quantity and accent always go together, the long- 

 est syllable, in almost every word, being that on 

 which the accent fells. In other languages, as Mit- 

 ford justly remarks (Essay on the Harmony of Lan- 

 guage), generally, the vowel character, representing 

 indifferently a long or a short sound, still represents 

 the same sound, long or short, A contrary method 

 is peculiar to English orthography. With us, the 

 same vowel sound, long and short, is rarely repre- 

 sented by the same character ; but, on the contrary, 

 according to the general rules of our orthography, 

 each character represents the long sound of one 

 vowel, and the short sound of another. This is emi- 

 nently observable, as Dr Johnson has remarked, in 

 the letter i, which likewise happens in other letters. 



