OBS. 23.—­In French, the infinitive is governed by several different prepositions, and the gerundive by one only, the preposition en,—­which, however, is sometimes suppressed; as, “en passant, en faisant,—­il alloit courant.”—­Traite des Participes, p. 2.  In English, the gerundive is governed by several different prepositions, and the infinitive by one only, the preposition to,—­which, in like manner, is sometimes suppressed; as, “to pass, to do,—­I saw him run.”  The difficulties in the syntax of the French participle in ant, which corresponds to ours in ing, are apparently as great in themselves, as those which the syntax of the English word presents; but they result from entirely different causes, and chiefly from the liability there is of confounding the participle with the verbal adjective, which is formed from it.  The confounding of it with the gerundive is now, in either language, of little or no consequence, since in modern French, as well as in English, both are indeclinable.  For this reason, I have framed the syntactical rule for participles so as to include under that name the gerund, or gerundive, which is a participle governed by a preposition.  The great difficulty with us, is, to determine whether the participle ought, or ought not, to be allowed to assume other characteristics of a noun, without dropping those of a participle, and without becoming wholly a noun.  The liability of confounding the English participle with the verbal or participial adjective, amounts to nothing more than the occasional misnaming of a word in parsing; or perhaps an occasional ambiguity in the style of some writer, as in the following citation:  “I am resolved, ’let the newspapers say what they please of canvassing beauties, haranguing toasts, and mobbing demireps,’ not to believe one syllable.”—­Jane West’s Letters to a Young Lady, p. 74.  From these words, it is scarcely possible to find out, even with the help of the context whether these three sorts of ladies are spoken of as the canvassers, haranguers, and mobbers, or as being canvassed, harangued, and mobbed.  If the prolixity and multiplicity of these observations transcend the reader’s patience, let him consider that the questions at issue cannot be settled by the brief enunciation of loose individual opinions, but must be examined in the light of all the analogies and facts that bear upon them.  So considerable are the difficulties of properly distinguishing the participle from the verbal adjective in French, that that indefatigable grammarian, Girault Du Vivier, after completing his Grammaire des Grammaires in two large octavo volumes, thought proper to enlarge his instructions on this head, and to publish them in a separate book, (Traite des Participes,) though we have it on his own authority, that the rule for participles had already given rise to a greater number of dissertations and particular treatises than any other point in French grammar.