its rules.

The rule of Latin stress was observed as it obtained in the time
of Quintilian. In the earliest Latin the usage had been other, the
stress coming as early in the word as was possible. Down to the days
of Terence and probably somewhat later the old rule still held good
of quadrisyllables with the scansion of _m[)u]l[)i][)e]r[)i]s_ or
_m[)u]l[)i][)e]r[=e]s_, but in other words had given way to the later
Quintilian rule, that all words with a long unit as penultimate
had the stress on the vowel in that unit, while words of more
than two syllables with a short penultimate had the stress on the
antepenultimate. I say 'unit' because here, as in scansion, what
counts is not the syllable, but the vowel plus all the consonants
that come between it and the next vowel. Thus _inférnus_, where the
penultimate vowel is short, no less than _suprémus_, where it is long,
has the stress on the penultima. In _volucris_, where the penultimate
unit was short, as it was in prose and could be in verse, the stress
was on the _o_, but when _ucr_ made a long unit the stress comes on
the _u_, though of course the vowel remains short. In polysyllables
there was a secondary stress on the alternate vowels. Ignorance of
this usage has made a present-day critic falsely accuse Shakespeare
of a false quantity in the line

Coríolánus in Coríoli.

It may be safely said that from the Reformation to the nineteenth
century no Englishman pronounced the last word otherwise than I have
written it. The author of the Pronouncing Dictionary attached to
the 'Dictionary of Gardening' unfortunately instructs us to say
_gládiolus_ on the ground that the _i_ is short. The ground alleged,