both the sense and all the words unaltered; but to drop or alter any word, is to pervert the text under pretence of resolving it, and to make a mockery of parsing.  Grammar rightly learned, enables one to understand both the sense and the construction of whatsoever is rightly written; and he who reads what he does not understand, reads to little purpose.  With great indignity to the muses, several pretenders to grammar have foolishly taught, that, “In parsing poetry, in order to come at the meaning of the author, the learner will find it necessary to transpose his language.”—­Kirkham’s Gram., p. 166.  See also the books of Merchant, Wilcox, O. B. Peirce, Hull, Smith, Felton, and others, to the same effect.  To what purpose can he transpose the words of a sentence, who does not first see what they mean, and how to explain or parse them as they stand?

OBS. 24.—­Errors innumerable have been introduced into the common modes of parsing, through a false notion of what constitutes a simple sentence.  Lowth, Adam, Murray, Gould, Smith, Ingersoll, Comly, Lennie, Hiley, Bullions, Wells, and many others, say, “A simple sentence has in it but one subject, and one finite verb:  as, ‘Life is short.’”—­L.  Murray’s Gram., p. 141.  In accordance with this assertion, some assume, that, “Every nominative has its own verb expressed or understood;” and that, “Every verb (except in the infinitive mood and participle) has its own nominative expressed or understood.”—­Bullions’s E. Gram., p. 87.  The adopters of these dogmas, of course think it right to supply a nominative whenever they do not find a separate one expressed for every finite verb, and a verb whenever they do not find a separate one expressed for every nominative.  This mode of interpretation not only precludes the agreement of a verb with two or more nominatives, so as to render nugatory two of the most important rules of these very gentlemen’s syntax; but, what is worse, it perverts many a plain, simple, and perfect sentence, to a form which its author did not choose, and a meaning which he never intended.  Suppose, for example, the text to be, “A good constitution and good laws make good subjects.”—­Webster’s Essays, p. 152.  Does not the verb make agree with constitution and laws, taken conjointly? and is it not a perversion of the sentence to interpret it otherwise?  Away then with all this needless subaudition! But while we thus deny that there can be a true ellipsis of what is not necessary to the construction, it is not to be denied that there are true ellipses, and in some men’s style very many.  The assumption of O. B. Peirce, that no correct sentence is elliptical, and his impracticable project of a grammar founded on this principle, are among the grossest of possible absurdities.