As it is, however, the joint operation of those three causes referred to already, namely, that the separation did not take place in the infancy or youth of the language, but only in its ripe manhood, that England and America owned a body of literature, to which they alike looked up and appealed as containing the authoritative standards of the language, that the intercourse between the one people and the other has been large and frequent, hereafter probably to be larger and more frequent still, has effectually wrought. It has been strong enough so to traverse, repress, and check all those causes which tended to divergence, that the _written_ language of educated men on both sides of the water remains precisely the same, their _spoken_ manifesting a few trivial differences of idiom; while even among those classes which do not consciously acknowledge any ideal standard of language, there are scarcely greater differences, in some respects far smaller, than exist between inhabitants of different provinces in this one island of England; and in the future we may reasonably anticipate that these differences, so far from multiplying, will rather diminish and disappear. {Sidenote: _Extinct English_} But I must return from this long digression. It seems often as if an almost unaccountable caprice presided over the fortunes of words, and determined which should live and which die. Thus in instances out of number a word lives on as a verb, but has ceased to be employed as a noun; we say ‘to embarrass’, but no longer an ‘embarrass’; ‘to revile’, but not, with Chapman and Milton, a ‘revile’; ‘to dispose’, but not a ‘dispose’{150}; ‘to retire’ but not a ‘retire’; ‘to wed’, but not a ‘wed’; we say ‘to infest’, but use no longer the adjective ‘infest’. Or with a reversed fortune a word lives on as a noun, but has perished as a verb--thus as a noun substantive, a ‘slug’, but no longer ‘to slug’ or render slothful; a ‘child’, but no longer ‘to child’, (“_childing_ autumn”, Shakespeare); a ‘rape’, but not ‘to rape’ (South); a ‘rogue’, but not ‘to rogue’; ‘malice’, but not ‘to malice’; a ‘path’, but not ‘to path’; or as a noun adjective, ‘serene’, but not ‘to serene’, a beautiful word, which we have let go, as the French have ‘sereiner’{151}; ‘meek’, but not ‘to meek’ (Wiclif); ‘fond’, but not ‘to fond’ (Dryden); ‘dead’, but not ‘to dead’; ‘intricate’, but ‘to intricate’ (Jeremy Taylor) no longer.