“Cicero maintained that whatsoever was useful was good.”—­“I observed that love constituted the whole moral character of God.”—­Dwight.  “Thinking that one gained nothing by being a good man.”—­Voltaire.  “I have already told you that I was a gentleman.”—­Fontaine.  “If I should ask, whether ice and water were two distinct species of things.”—­Locke.  “A stranger to the poem would not easily discover that this was verse.”—­Murray’s Gram., 12mo, p. 260.  “The doctor affirmed, that fever always produced thirst.”—­Inst., p. 192.  “The ancients asserted, that virtue was its own reward.”—­Ib. “They should not have repeated the error, of insisting that the infinitive was a mere noun.”—­Diversions of Purley, Vol. i, p. 288.  “It was observed in Chap.  III. that the distinctive or had a double use.”—­Churchill’s Gram., p. 154.  “Two young gentlemen, who have made a discovery that there was no God.”—­Swift.

RULE XVIII.—­INFINITIVES.

The Infinitive Mood is governed in general by the preposition TO, which commonly connects it to a finite verb:  as, “I desire TO learn.”—­Dr. Adam.  “Of me the Roman people have many pledges, which I must strive, with my utmost endeavours, TO preserve, TO defend, TO confirm, and TO redeem.”—­Duncan’s Cicero, p. 41.

   “What if the foot, ordain’d the dust TO tread,
    Or hand TO toil, aspir’d TO be the head?”—­Pope.

OBSERVATIONS ON RULE XVIII.

OBS. 1.—­No word is more variously explained by grammarians, than this word TO, which is put before the verb in the infinitive mood.  Johnson, Walker, Scott, Todd, and some other lexicographers, call it an adverb; but, in explaining its use, they say it denotes certain relations, which it is not the office of an adverb to express. (See the word in Johnson’s Quarto Dictionary.) D. St. Quentin, in his Rudiments of General Grammar, says, “To, before a verb, is an adverb;” and yet his “Adverbs are words that are joined to verbs or adjectives, and express some circumstance or quality.”  See pp. 33 and 39.  Lowth, Priestley, Fisher, L. Murray, Webster, Wilson, S. W. Clark, Coar, Comly, Blair, Felch, Fisk, Greenleaf, Hart, Weld, Webber, and others, call it a preposition; and some of these ascribe to it the government of the verb, while others do not.  Lowth says, “The preposition TO, placed before the verb, makes the infinitive mood.”—­Short Gram., p. 42.  “Now this,” says Horne Tooke, “is manifestly not so:  for TO placed before the verb loveth, will not make the infinitive mood.  He would have said more truly, that TO placed before some nouns, makes verbs.”—­Diversions of Purley, Vol. i, p. 287.