[ca. January 1827]. Price, Uvedale to Browning, Elizabeth Barrett.

              The original of this letter was returned to Mr Price

by his desire: as it was his intention to introduce

some of its statements into his essay.

This letter will be entirely on the Charterhouse pronunciation of the iambus & pyrrhic; & tho the subject thus shortly announced seems to lie in a narrow compass, yet its bearings are so various & embrace so many points of consequence in recitation that the discussion will I foresee be a long one: & I am desirous of explaining fully & regularly what I occasionally threw out in conversation. I must make some preliminary statements in order to clear my way: & if I repeat some part of what I said in my last letter, it is that you may be able to consider the whole chain of argument at one view. First what we call accent is under that misleading name, simply & merely quantity: accented syllables being long, unaccented short: in fact the only way we have of marking a long syllable is by placing an accent over it, the only way of indicating a short syllable is the omission of the accent.

This indeed is a controverted point which I have considered & placed in a variety of lights: there is however, one short proof which alone seems to me decisive. It is that the ancient marks of long & short, & the accentual mark we make use of, are convertible. Thus if for instance, in an English line, you place the mark of long where we lay our accent, & the mark of short where we do not, our usual pronunciation will be no less clearly indicated than by the accentual mark; as