dialects of Scotland, Northumberland, Durham, and Yorkshire, the word
for "hoarfrost" is not _rime_, but _rind_, with a derived adjective
_rindy_, which has the same sense as _rimy_. At the same time, he
called attention yet once more to the passage in _Beowulf_. It is
established, accordingly, that the suspected mistake in the MS. is no
mistake at all; that the form _hrinde_ is correct, being a contraction
of _hrindge_ or _hrindige_, plural of the adjective _hrindig_, which
is preserved in our dialects, in the form _rindy_, to this very day.
In direct contradiction of a common popular error that regards our
dialectal forms as being, for the most part, "corrupt," it will be
found by experience that they are remarkably conservative and antique.




CHAPTER II

DIALECTS IN EARLY TIMES


The history of our dialects in the earliest periods of which we have
any record is necessarily somewhat obscure, owing to the scarcity of
the documents that have come down to us. The earliest of these have
been carefully collected and printed in one volume by Dr Sweet,
entitled _The Oldest English Texts_, edited for the Early English
Text Society in 1885. Here we already find the existence of no
less than four dialects, which have been called by the names of
Northumbrian, Mercian, Wessex (or Anglo-Saxon), and Kentish. These
correspond, respectively, though not quite exactly, to what we may
roughly call Northern, Midland, Southern, and Kentish. Whether the