.

"What if the foot, ordain'd the dust TO _tread_,
Or hand TO _toil_, aspir'd TO _be_ the head?"--_Pope_.

OBSERVATIONS ON RULE XVIII.

OBS. 1.--No word is more variously explained by grammarians, than this word
TO, which is put before the verb in the infinitive mood. Johnson, Walker,
Scott, Todd, and some other lexicographers, call it an _adverb_; but, in
explaining its use, they say it denotes certain _relations_, which it is
not the office of an adverb to express. (See the word in _Johnson's Quarto
Dictionary_.) D. St. Quentin, in his Rudiments of General Grammar, says,
"_To_, before a verb, is an _adverb_;" and yet his "Adverbs are words that
are joined to verbs or adjectives, and express some _circumstance_ or
_quality_." See pp. 33 and 39. Lowth, Priestley, Fisher, L. Murray,
Webster, Wilson, S. W. Clark, Coar, Comly, Blair, Felch, Fisk, Greenleaf,
Hart, Weld, Webber, and others, call it a _preposition_; and some of these
ascribe to it the government of the verb, while others do not. Lowth says,
"The _preposition_ TO, placed before the verb, _makes_ the infinitive
mood."--_Short Gram._, p. 42. "Now this," says Horne Tooke, "is manifestly
not so: for TO placed before the verb _loveth_, will not make the
infinitive mood. He would have said more truly, that TO placed before some
_nouns_, makes _verbs_."--_Diversions of Purley_, Vol. i, p. 287.

OBS. 2.--Skinner, in his _Canones Etymologici_, calls this TO "an
_equivocal article_,"--_Tooke_, ib., i, 288. Nutting, a late American
grammarian, says: "The _sign_ TO is no other than the Greek article _to_;
as, _to agapan_ [, to love]; or, as some say, it is the Saxon
_do_"--_Practical Gram._, p. 66. Thus, by suggesting two false and
inconsistent derivations, though he uses not the name _equivocal article_,
he first makes the word an _article_, and then _equivocal_--equivocal in
etymology, and of course in meaning.[403] Nixon, in his English Parser,
supposes it to be, _unequivocally_, the Greek article [Greek: to], _the_.
See the work, p. 83. D. Booth says, "_To_ is, by us, applied to Verbs; but
it was the neuter Article (_the_) among the Greeks."--_Introd. to Analyt.
Dict._, p. 60. According to Horne Tooke, "Minshew also distinguishes
between the preposition TO, and the _sign_ of the infinitive TO. Of the
former he is silent, and of the latter he says: 'To, as _to_ make, _to_
walk, _to_ do, a Graeco articulo [Greek: to].' But Dr. Gregory Sharpe is
persuaded, t