prefixing of a
short syllable to the line. Feet, and the orders of verse, are
distinguished one from an other by two things, and in general by two only;
the number of syllables taken as a foot, and the order of their quantities.
Trochaic verse is always as distinguishable from iambic, as iambic is from
any other. Yet have we several grammarians and prosodies who contrive to
confound them--or who, at least, mistake catalectic trochaic for catalectic
iambic; and that too, where the syllable wanting affects only the last
foot, and makes it perhaps but a common and needful caesura.

OBS. 2.--To suppose that iambic verse may drop its initial short syllable,
and still be iambic, still be measured as before, is not only to take a
single long syllable for a foot, not only to recognize a pedal caesura at
the _beginning_ of each line, but utterly to destroy the only principles on
which iambics and trochaics can be discriminated. Yet Hiley, of Leeds, and
Wells, of Andover, while they are careful to treat separately of these two
orders of verse, not only teach that any order may take at the end "an
additional syllable," but also suggest that the iambic _may drop_ a
syllable "from the first foot," without diminishing the number of
feet,--without changing the succession of quantities,--without disturbing
the mode of scansion! "Sometimes," say they, (in treating of iambics,) "a
syllable is cut off from the first foot; as,

Praise | to God, | immor |-tal praise,
For | the love | that crowns | our days."[--BARBAULD.]
_Hiley's E. Gram._, Third Edition, London, p. 124;
_Wells's_, Third Edition, p. 198.

OBS. 3.--Now this couplet is the precise exemplar, not only of the
thirty-six lines of which it is a part, but also of the most common of our
trochaic metres; and if this may be thus scanned into iambic verse, so may
all other trochaic lines in existence: distinction between the two orders
must then be worse than useless. But I reject this doctrine, and trust that
most readers will easily see its absurdity. A prosodist might just as well
scan all iambics into trochaics, by pronouncing each initial short syllable
to be hypermeter. For, surely, if deficiency may be discovered at the
_beginning_ of measurement, so may redundance. But if neither is to be
looked for before the measurement ends, (which supposition is certainly
more reasonable,) then is the distinction already vindicated, and the
scansion above-cite