THE HE design of this Third Part of the Grammatical Institute of the English Language, is to furnish schools with a variety of exercises for Reading and Speaking; and I have endeavoured to make such a collection of essays as should form the morals as well as improve the knowledge of youth. In the choice of pieces, I have been attentive to the political interest of America. I consider it as a capital fault in all our schools, that the books generally used contain subjects wholly uninteresting to our youth; while the writings that marked the revolution, which are perhaps not inferior to the orations of Cicero and Demosthenes, and which are calculated to impress interesting truths upon young minds, lie neglected and forgotten. Several of those masterly addresses of Congress, written at the commencement of the late revolution, contain such noble sentiments of liberty and patriotism, that I cannot help wishing to transfuse them into the breasts of the rising generation. FOR READING AND SPEAKING. A RULE I. Let your articulation be clear and distinct. GOOD articulation confists in giving every letter and fyllable its proper pronunciation of found. Let each fyllable, and the letters which compose it, be pronounced with a clear voice, without whining drawling, lifping, stammering, mumbling in the throat, or speaking through the nose. Avoid equally a dull drawling habit, and too much rapidity of pronunciation for each of these faults destroys a diftinct articulation. RULE 11. Observe the Stops, and mark the proper Pauses, but make no pause where the sense requires none. The characters we use as stops are extremely arbitrary and do not always marka suspenfion of the voice. On the contrary, they are often employed to feparate thie several members of a period, and show the grammatical conftruction. Nor when they are deftigned to mark pauses, do they always determine the length of thofe paufes; for this depends much on the fenfe and the nature of the fubject. A femicolon, for example, requires a longer pause in a grave discourse, thần in a lively and spirited declamation. However, as children are incapable of nice diftinctions, it may be best to adopt, at first, fome general rule with respect to the paufes*, and teach them to pay the fame attention to these characters as they do to the words. They should be cautioned likewife against pausing in the midst of a member of a fentence, where the sense requires the words to be closely connected in pronunciation. *** See First Part of the Institute, where the proportion of the comma, semicolon, colon, and period, is fixed at one, two, four and six. 1 RULE III. Pay the strictest attention to Accent, Emphasis, and Ca dence. Let the accented fyllables be pronounced with a proper stress of voice; the unaccented, with little Aress of voice, but diftinctly. The important part of a fentence, which I call naturally emphatical, have a claim to a confiderable force of voice; but particles, such as of, to, as, and, &c. require no force of utterance, unless they happen to be emphatical, which is rarely the case. No person can read or speak well unless he understands what he reads; and the sense will always determine what words are emphatical, It is a matter of the highest consequence, therefore, that a speaker should clearly comprehend the meaning of what he delivers, that he may know where to lay the emphasis. This may be illustrated by a single example. This short question, Will you ride to town to day? is capable of four different meanings, and consequently of four different answers, according to the placing of the emphasis. If the emphasis is laid upon you, the question is whether you will ride to town or another. person. If the emphasis is laid on ride, the question is, whether you will ride or go on foot. If the emphasis is laid on town, the question is, whether you will ride to town or to another place. If the emphasis is laid on to day, the question is whether you will ride to day or some other day. Thus the whole meaning of a phrase often depends on the emphasis; and it is absolutely necessary that it should be laid on the proper words. Cadence is a falling of the voice in pronouncing the closing syllable of a period. This ought not to be uniform, but different at the close of different sentences. But in interrogative sentences, the sense often requires * We may observe that good speakers always pronounce upon a certain key; for altho they modulate the voice according to the various ideas they express, yet they retain the same pitch of voice. Accent and Emphasis requite no elevation of the voice; but a more Porcible expression on the same key. Cadence respects the last syllable only of the sentence, which syllable is actually proncunced with a lower tone of voice; but, when words of several sylla. bles cause a period, all the syllables but the last are pronounced in the same key as the rest of the sentence.. |