(7.) "The unity of the word consists in the tone or accent, which binds together the two parts of the composition."—Fowler's E. Gram., §360.
(8.) "The accent of the ancients is the opprobrium of modern criticism. Nothing can show more evidently the fallibility of the human faculties, than the total ignorance we are in at present of the nature of the Latin and Greek accent."—Walker's Principles, No. 486; Dict., p. 53.
(9.) "It is not surprising, that the accent and quantity of the ancients should be so obscure and mysterious, when two such learned men of our own nation as Mr. Foster and Dr. Gaily, differ about the very existence of quantity in our own language."—Walker's Observations on Accent, &c.; Key, p. 311.
(10.) "What these accents are has puzzled the learned so much that they seem neither to understand each other nor themselves."—Walker's Octavo Dict., w. Barytone.
(11.) "The ancients designated the pitch of vocal sounds by the term accent; making three kinds of accents, the acute (é), the grave (è), and the circumflex (ê), which signified severally the rise, the fall, and the turn of the voice, or union of acute and grave on the same syllable."—Sargent's Standard Speaker, p. 18.
[460] "Interrogatio, Græcè Erotema, Accentum quoque transfert; ut, Ter. Siccine ais Parmenó? Voss. Susenbr."—Prat's Latin Grammar, 8vo, Part II, p. 190.
[461] In regard to the admission of a comma before the verb, by the foregoing exception, neither the practice of authors nor the doctrine of punctuators is entirely uniform; but, where a considerable pause is, and must be, made in the reading, I judge it not only allowable, but necessary, to mark it in writing. In W. Day's "Punctuation Reduced to a System," a work of no inconsiderable merit, this principle is disallowed; and even when the adjunct of the nominative is a relative clause, which, by Rule 2d below and its first exception, requires a comma after it but none before it, this author excludes both, putting no comma before the principal verb. The following is an example: "But it frequently happens, that punctuation is not made a prominent exercise in schools; and the brief manner in which the subject is there dismissed has proved insufficient to impress upon the minds of youth a due sense of its importance."—Day's Punctuation, p. 32. A pupil of mine would here have put a comma after the word dismissed. So, in the following examples, after sake, and after dispenses: "The vanity that would accept power for its own sake is the pettiest of human passions."—Ib., p. 75. "The generous delight of beholding the happiness he dispenses is the highest enjoyment of man."—Ib., p, 100.
[462] When several nominatives are connected, some authors and printers put the comma only where the conjunction is omitted. W. Day separates them all, one from an other; but after the last, when this is singular before a plural verb, he inserts no point. Example: "Imagination is one of the principal ingredients which enter into the complex idea of genius; but judgment, memory, understanding, enthusiasm, and sensibility are also included."—Day's Punctuation, p. 52. If the points are to be put where the pauses naturally occur, here should be a comma after sensibility; and, if I mistake not, it would be more consonant with current usage to set one there. John Wilson, however, in a later work, which is for the most part a very good one, prefers the doctrine of Day, as in the following instance: "Reputation, virtue, and happiness depend greatly on the choice of companions."—Wilson's Treatise on Punctuation, p. 30.
[463] Some printers, and likewise some authors, suppose a series of words to require the comma, only where the conjunction is suppressed. This is certainly a great error. It gives us such punctuation as comports neither with the sense of three or more words in the same construction, nor with the pauses which they require in reading. "John, James and Thomas are here," is a sentence which plainly tells John that James and Thomas are here; and which, if read according to this pointing, cannot possibly have any other meaning. Yet this is the way in which the rules of Cooper, Felton, Frost, Webster, and perhaps others, teach us to point it, when we mean to tell somebody else that all three are here! In his pretended "Abridgment of Murray's English Grammar," (a work abounding in small thefts from Brown's Institutes,) Cooper has the following example: "John, James or Joseph intends to accompany me."—Page 120. Here, John being addressed, the punctuation is right; but, to make this noun a nominative to the verb, a comma must be put after each of the others. In Cooper's "Plain and Practical Grammar," the passage is found in this form: "John, James, or Joseph intends to accompany us."—Page 132. This pointing is doubly wrong; because it is adapted to neither sense. If the three nouns have the same construction, the principal pause will be immediately before the verb; and surely a comma is as much required by that pause, as by the second. See the Note on Rule 3d, above.
[464] In punctuation, the grammar here cited is unaccountably defective. This is the more strange, because many of its errors are mere perversions of what was accurately pointed by an other hand. On the page above referred to, Dr. Bullions, in copying from Lennie's syntactical exercises a dozen consecutive lines, has omitted nine needful commas, which Lennie had been careful to insert!