Besides those who make English verse to depend wholly on accent, and those who give it time-values equally regular and measurable with those of music, there is a third class disposed to confuse the two elements of quantity and accent. Of this class was Edgar Poe, who in his essay on The Rationale of Verse constantly spoke of accented and unaccented syllables as "long" and "short," respectively, and was even disposed to carry the identification into Latin verse itself. This essay of Poe's has lately been defended by Mr. John M. Robertson, in the interesting Appendix to his _New Essays toward a Critical Method_ (1897). Unfortunately Mr. Robertson seems to have perpetuated deliberately the confusion which he found in Poe in the use of the terms "accent" and "quantity." He even says that the attempt to distinguish them is ill-founded, "that quantity in speaking _must_ amount substantially to the same thing as stress," and, again, that "Poe's identification of stress with length is perfectly sound." Whatever be the fundamental fact here, the use of terms cannot be commended. If quantity is swallowed up in accent, so that accent alone dominates our verse, that is one thing; if the conditions are such that a heavy stress and a long quantity nearly always coincide, that is also a possible doctrine; but that is not to say that the two things should be identified. If all tall men wear long coats, or if all men--tall and short--wear long coats, it follows in neither case that tallness and long-coatedness are the same thing. It is a mere matter of physics that duration of sound and intensity of sound are perfectly distinguishable, and that they have no necessary connection with each other. The problem is: how are they related in practice?