PREFAGE.

HAVING had the honour, a few years ago, to give public lectures on English Pronunciation at the University of Oxford, I was some time afterwards invited by several of the Heads of Houses to give private lectures on the Art of Reading, in their respective Colleges. So flattering an invitation made me extremely anxious to preserve the favourable impression I had made, and this put me upon throwing the instruction I had to convey into something that had the appearance of a system. Those only who are thoroughly acquainted with the subject, can conceive the labour and perplexity in which this task engaged me: it was not a florid harangue on the advantages of good reading that was expected from me, but some plain practical rules in a scholastic and methodical form, that would convey real and useful instruction.

This led me to a distinction of the voice, which, though often mentioned by musicians, has been but little noticed by teachers of reading;* which is that distinction of the voice into the upward and downward slide, into which all speaking sounds may be

In the first edition of this work, I expressed myself with a scrupulous caution, respecting this distinction of voice; because, in a grammar, written a century ago by Charles Butler, of Magdalen College, Oxford, I found a direction for reading the question beginning with the verb, not only in a higher tone, but with a different turn of the voice from the other question; and in a grammar by Mr. Perry, of Scotland, about thirty years ago, I found the same distinction of voice in the same case: and, except in these two authors, I never met with this distinction in reading till the last edition of Enfield's Speaker; where, in Rule VII. of the Essay on Elocution, instead of the old direction, Acquire a just variety of Pause and Cadence, I found, Acquire a just variety of Pause and Inflexion; and though in the old Rule there was not a single word about inflexion of the voice, in the new one I found the inflexions of the voice divided into two kinds; the one conveying the idea of continuation, the other of completion; the former of which is called the suspending, the latter the closing pause:-though, in a few lines after, we find what is called the closing pause, is often applicable to members, when the sense is suspended. In these new directions, too, I found the question distinguished into two kinds, and the suspending and the closing pause applied respectively to each. I could not help congratulating myself, that a doctrine I had published so many years before, began to be adopted by so judicious a writer as Mr. Enfield. But, when I found it had not only been adopted, but acknowledged, by Mr. Murray, the author of the best Grammar and Selection of Lessons for reading in the English Language, I found myself fully compensated for the misfortune of not being noticed by the author of the Speaker.