European compilations of the day, the authors of which have opportunities for selection, not enjoyed in this country. Finding, on comparison, that the following history of the voice represents its nature more extensively and definitely than any known system, I am induced to offer it to the public. Many errors may be found in it; but if the leading points of analysis, and the general method be not a copy from nature, and do not prompt others to carry the subject into practical detail, I shall forever regret the publication.

It becomes me, however, to remark, that as this work has not been made up from the quoted, or controverted, or accommodated opinions of authors, I shall totally disregard any decision upon its merits, which is not made by a scrutinizing comparison with nature herself.

The art of speaking well, has, in most civilized countries, been a cherished mark of distinction between the elevated and the humble conditions of life, and has been immediately connected with some of the greater labours of ambition and taste. It may therefore appear extraordinary, that the world, with all its works of philosophy, should have been satisfied with an instinctive exercise of the art, and with occasional examples of its perfection, without an endeavour to found an analytic system of instruction, productive of more multiplied instances of Due reflection, however, will convince us, that even this extended purpose of the art of speaking, has been one of the causes of neglect. It has been a popular art; and works for popularity are too often the works of mediocrity. The majority of the bar, the senate, the pulpit, and the stage, deprecate the trouble of improvement: and the satisfaction of the general ear is, in no less a degree, encouraging to the faults of the voice, than the approving judgment of the million is subversive of the rigid discipline of the mind.

success.

Physiologists have described, and classed the organic positions by which the alphabetic elements are produced. This has been done by the rule, and with the success of philosophy. Other attempts have not been so satisfactory. In treating the subject of Intonation, that is, the movement of the voice in regard to its pitch, they have not accurately measured, by some known or invented scale, the modes and degrees of such movements; and thus furnished a real detail of the economy of

speech. But they have endeavoured to determine whether the organs of the voice partake of the nature of a wind or stringed instrument-how the falsette is made-and whether acuteness and gravity are formed by variations in the dimensions of the glottis, or in the tension of its chords. After removing the organs from men and other animals, they have produced something like their living voices by blowing through them. They have inspected the cartilages and muscles of the larynx, with the purpose to discover thereby the immediate cause of intonation, when they were ignorant of the very forms of that intonation. In short, they have tried to see sound, and to touch it with the dissecting knife-and all this, without reaching any positive conclusion, or describing more of the audible effects of the anatomical structure, than was known two thousand years ago.

Instead of listening to the forms of vocal sound, and recording them, physiologists, from the time of Galen to the present, have done little more than repeat the common-places of remark and argument, with that variety only which mere capricious changes in arrangement produce.

The Greek and Roman rhetoricians, and writers on music, have recorded their knowledge of the functions of the voice. They distinguished its different qualities by such terms as hard, smooth, sharp, clear, hoarse, full, slender, flowing, flexible, shrill, and austere. They knew the time of the voice, and had a view to its quantities in pronunciation. They gave to loud and soft, appropriate places in speech. They perceived the existence of pitch, or variation of high and low: and noted further, that the rise and fall in speaking are made by a concrete or continuous slide of the voice. This concrete sound, was, by them, contra-distinguished from the change of pitch produced on musical instruments; which consists in a rise or fall to other places of pitch, without the continuous junction of the slide. This was called discrete sound.

The ancients however show no acquaintance with the subdivisions, definite degrees, and particular applications of these general affections, for the discriminative purposes of oratorical use: and if we may judge, from an attempt by Dionysius of Halicarnassus to point out the difference between singing and speech, and from some other descriptions, totally irreconcilea

ble with any of the present modes of intonation, we must believe that they made only a limited analysis of the voice; that the cultivation of the art of speaking was conducted altogether by imitation; and that the means of improvement were not reduced to any precise or available directions of art.

No one can read the discourse on the management of the voice, in Quinctilian's elaborate chapter on action, without allowing to the ancients a power of perceiving the beauties and blemishes of speech. Yet among so many indications of their practical familiarity with the art, we find no clear description of its elements, nor any definite instruction. The abundant detail throughout his work, which more than once suggests an apology for its minuteness, precludes the supposition that he designedly omitted to describe any well known means, by which the various modes of the voice might be represented with useful precision.

It is believed that the ancient rhetoricians designated the pitch of vocal sounds by the term Accent. They made three kinds of accents, the acute, the grave, and the circumflex; signifying, severally, the rise, fall, and turn of the voice. The existence, in Greek manuscripts, of certain marks, which however were not applied till about the seventh century, afforded the only data, for modern inquiry into the nature of Greek intonation, and created a learned dispute, which has been continued without one satisfactory result, from the time of the Younger Vossius, to the recent days of Foster and Gally.

If Greek scholars had employed other means than contests with each other, for ascertaining the purpose of accentual marks, it would long ago have been determined whether they direct to any practical knowledge of Greek utterance, or are merely a subject for useless contention. If the tongue had been once consulted on this point, these symbols, even with the certainty of their alleged use, would have been rejected as vague and meagre representations of the rich and measurable variety of the voice.

The disputants found that degree of obscurity in the ancient records on accent, which encourages the profitless labours, and alternate triumphs of party; which subjects opinion to all the chicanery of sectarian argument, and shuts out the conclusive inquiries of independent observation. In the full spirit of the

old dialectic art, they discoursed about truth until they forgot to discover it:' and whilst they exhibit a distressing waste of time and thought and temper, by seeking in the obscurity of unfinished records, that light which would readily have arisen on their observation, they hold out to the future historians of literature, a temptation towards the sarcastic inquiry, whether the writers on Greek and Roman accent were endowed with the powers of hearing and pronunciation.

Since the decline or limitation of classic authority, modern inquirers, by listening to the sounds of their own language, have at last undertaken to discover other elemental functions of the voice, than those represented by accentual marks.

The works of Steele, Sheridan and Walker, have made large contributions to the long neglected and still craving condition of our tongue.

Mr. Joshua Steele published, at London, in the year seventeen hundred and seventy-five, 'An essay towards establishing the melody and measure of speech, to be expressed and perpetuated, by peculiar symbols.' The design of this essay was suggested by some remarks on the nature of speech, made by Lord Monboddo, in his 'Origin and progress of language;' and was executed, in part, as an argumentative correspondence between this Author and Mr. Steele.

Future times may smile at some of the effects of classical pursuits, if they should ever know that a free inquirer had considerable difficulty, in convincing a scholar, at the end of the eighteenth century, that the English language has those qualities of accent and quantity, which were supposed to belong exclusively to the Greek and Latin: for this was one of the objects in the controversy. Mr. Steele has therefore given a notation of the time of the voice: and in showing that the same concrete intonation which belonged to syllables of the Greek language, is necessarily heard on those of his own, has endeavoured, but unsuccessfully, to describe its specific application and range. The principal design of his work is, to set forth a system of rythmic notation, by which the accidents of emphasis and pause may be represented to a pupil; and the habit of attention fixed on these great points in the art of reading.

Mr. Steele seems to have possessed nicety of ear; a knowledge of the science and practice of music; and an originality of

C

mind, created by observation and reflection: powers sufficient to have investigated successfully the nature of speech.

Had he pursued truth by observation instead of controversy; had he not suffered the harmless respect of a verbal decorum towards the opinions of others, to exert a secret weight of authority; had he not looked back to the ancients, and the dark confusion of their commentators, but kept his undeviating ear on nature, she would at at last have led him up to light.

Mr. Sheridan is well known by his accurate and systematic investigation of the art of reading: and though he improved both the detail and method of his subject, in the departments of pronunciation, emphasis, and pause, he made no analysis of intonation. A regretted omission! The more so, from the certainty, that if this topic had seriously invited his attention, his genius and industry would have shed much light of explanation upon it.

Mr. Walker, who, by his rhetorical and philological labours, has contributed largely to the improvement of the English language, exhibits in more than one place of his works, that the varieties of intonation were studiously examined by him: indeed, he reiterates his claims to originality on this subject. Mr. Walker may have been the first to endeavour to apply the conjectural system of accents to a modern language: but he has scarcely gone beyond the analysis on which the ancient doctrine of inflection was founded. The Greek writers on music, had a discriminative knowledge of the rise, fall, and circumflex turn of speech. Aristoxenus the philosopher, a pupil of Aristotle, discovered or first described that peculiar rise and fall of sound by a concrete or continuous progression, which distinguishes the vocal slide, from the skipping or discrete transition on musical instruments.

Mr. Walker does triumphantly claim the discovery of the inverted circumflex accent, or the downward-and-upward continued movement. Yet, if it is correctly inferred from the dates of publication, and from Mr. Walker's rather derisive allusion to Mr. Steele's essay, that the latter author preceded him, he might have found, in Mr. Steele's gravo-acute accent, proof of the real existence of his newly found function of the voice.

Mr. Walker was a celebrated elocutionist, and may have