s_ and _retained_ ACTION, they express _present_
time; and must be treated accordingly."--P. 103. This seems to intimate
that even, "_I am smitten_," and its likes, as they stand, may have some
good claim to be of the present tense; which suggestion is contrary to
several others made by the author. To expound this, or any other passive
term, _passively_, never enters his mind: with him, as with sundry others,
"ACTION," "_finished_ ACTION," or "_progressive_ ACTION," is all any
_passive_ verb or participle ever means! No marvel, that awkward
perversions of the forms of utterance and the principles of grammar should
follow such interpretation. In Wright's syntax a very queer distinction is
apparently made between a passive verb, and the participle chiefly
constituting it; and here, too, through a fancied ellipsis of "_being_"
before the latter, most, if not all, of his other positions concerning
passives, are again disastrously overthrown by something worse--a word
"_imperceptibly understood_." "'_I am smitten_;' '_I was smitten_;' &c.,
are," he says, "the _universally acknowledged forms_ of the VERBS in these
tenses, in the passive voice:--not of the _PARTICIPLE_. In all verbal
constructions of the character of which we have hitherto treated, (see page
103) _and, where_ the ACTIONS described are _continuous_ in their
_operations_,--the participle BEING is _imperceptibly omitted, by
ellipsis_."--P. 144.

OBS. 15.--Dr. Bullions has stated, that, "The present participle active,
and the present participle passive, are _not counterparts_ to each other in
signification; [,] the one signifying the present doing, and the other the
present suffering of an action, [;] for the latter _always intimates the
present being of an_ ACT, _not in progress, but completed_."--_Prin. of
Eng. Gram._, p. 58. In this, he errs no less grossly than in his idea of
the "_action_ or the suffering" expressed by "a _perfect_ participle," as
cited in OBS. 5th above; namely, that it must have _ceased_. Worse
interpretation, or balder absurdity, is scarcely to be met with; and yet
the reverend Doctor, great linguist as he should be, was here only trying
to think and tell the common import of a very common sort of _English_
participles; such as, "_being loved_" and "_being seen_." In grammar, "_an
act_," that has "_present being_," can be nothing else than an act now
doing, or "_in progress_;" and if, "_the present being of an_ ACT _not in
progress_," were