is the direct effect of the sun’s shining.  But clouds sometimes intervene and prevent the rays from extending to the earth; but then we do not say “the sun shines.”  You see at once, that all we know or can know of the fact we state as truth, is derived from a knowledge of the very effects which our grammars tell us do not exist.  Strange logic indeed!  It is a mark of a wiser man, and a better scholar, not to know the popular grammars, than it is to profess any degree of proficiency in them!

To smile.

The smiles of the morning, the smiles of affection, a smile of kindness, are only produced by the appearance of something that smiles upon us. Smiles are the direct consequence of smiling.  If a person should smile ever so sweetly and yet present no smiles, they might, for aught we could know to the contrary, be sour as vinegar.

But this verb frequently has another object after it; as, “to smile the wrinkles from the brow of age,” or “smile dull cares away.”  “A sensible wife would soon reason and smile him into good nature.”

But I need not multiply examples.  When such men as Johnson, Walker, Webster, Murray, Lowthe, and a host of other wise and renowned men, gravely tell us that eat and drink, which they define, “to take food; to feed; to take a meal; to go to meals; to be maintained in food; to swallow liquors; to quench thirst; to take any liquid;” are intransitive or neuter verbs, having no objects after them, we must think them insincere, egregiously mistaken, or else possessed of a means of subsistence different from people generally!  Did they eat and drink, “take food and swallow liquors,” intransitively; that is, without eating or drinking any thing?  Is it possible in the nature of things?  Who does not see the absurdity?  And yet they were great men, and nobody has a right to question such high authority.  And the “simplifiers” who have come after, making books and teaching grammar to earn their bread, have followed close in their footsteps, and, I suppose, eaten nothing, and thrown their bread away!  Was I a believer in neuter verbs and desired to get money, my first step would be to set up a boarding house for all believers in, and practisers of, intransitive verbs.  I would board cheap and give good fare.  I could afford it, for no provisions would be consumed.