“Bonaparte lost the battle of Waterloo.”  What did he do to lose the battle?  He exerted his utmost skill to gain the battle and escape defeat.  He did not do a single act, he entertained not a single thought, which lead to such a result; but strove against it with all his power.  If the fault was his, it was because he failed to act, and not because he labored to lose the battle.  He had too much at stake to adopt such a course, and no man but a teacher of grammar, would ever accuse him of acting to lose the battle.

“A man was sick; he desired to recover (his health).  He took, for medicine, opium by mistake, and lost his life by it.”  Was he guilty of suicide?  Certainly, if our grammars are true.  But he lost his life in trying to get well.

“A man in America possesses property in Europe, and his children inherit it after his death.”  What do the children do to inherit this property, of which they know nothing?

“The geese, by their gabbling, saved Rome from destruction.”  How did the geese save the city?  They made a noise, which waked the sentinels, who roused the soldiers to arms; they fought, slew many Gauls, and delivered the city.

“A man in New-York transacts business in Canton.”  How does he do it?  He has an agent there to whom he sends his orders, and he transacts the business.  But how does he get his letters?  The clerk writes them, the postman carries them on board the ship, the captain commands the sailors, who work the ropes which unfurl the sails, the wind blows, the vessel is managed by the pilot, and after a weary voyage of several months, the letters are delivered to the agent, who does the business that is required of him.

The miser denies himself every comfort, and spends his whole life in hoarding up riches; and yet he dies and leaves his gold to be the possession of others.

Christians suffer insults almost every day from the Turks.

Windows admit light and exclude cold.

Who can discover any thing like transitive action—­a passing from the agent to the object—­in these cases?  What transitive action do the windows perform to admit the light; or the christians, to suffer insults; or the miser, to leave his money?  If there is neutrality any where, we would look for it here.  The fact is, these words express relative action, as we shall explain when we come to the examination of the true character of the verb.

Neutrality signifies (transitive verb!) no action, and neuter verbs express a state of being!  A class of words which can not act, which apply to things in a quiescent state, perform the transitive action of “expressing a state of being!”

Who does not perceive the inconsistency and folly of such distinctions?  And who has not found himself perplexed, if not completely bewildered in the dark and intricate labyrinths into which he has been led by the false grammar books!  Every attempt he has made to extricate himself, by the dim light of the “simplifiers,” has only tended to bewilder him still more, till he is utterly confounded, or else abandons the study altogether.