English_, Part II.

The other great work of the same date is the vast collection edited
for the Early English Text Society by Dr Horstmann in 1887, entitled,
_The Early South-English Legendary_, or Lives of Saints. It is extant
in several MSS., of which the oldest (MS. Laud 108) originally
contained 67 Lives; with an Appendix, in a later hand, containing
two more. The eleventh Life is that of St Dunstan, which is printed
in _Specimens of Early English_, Part II, from another MS.

Soon after the year 1300 the use of the Southern dialect becomes
much less frequent, with the exception of such pieces as belong
particularly to the county of Kent and will be considered by
themselves. There are two immense manuscript collections of various
poems, originally in various dialects, which are worth notice.
One of these is the Harleian MS. No. 2253, in the British Museum, the
scribe of which has reduced everything into the South-Western dialect,
though it is plain that, in many cases, it is not the dialect in which
the pieces were originally composed; this famous manuscript belongs to
the beginning of the fourteenth century. Many poems were printed from
it, with the title of _Altenglische Dichtungen_, by Dr K. Böddeker,
in 1878. Another similar collection is contained in the Vernon MS. at
Oxford, and belongs to the very end of the same century; the poems in
it are all in a Southern dialect, which is that of the scribe. It
contains, e.g., a copy of the earliest version of _Piers the Plowman_,
which would have been far more valuable if the scribe had retained the
spelling of his copy. This may help us to realise one of the great
difficulties which beset the study of dialects, namely, that we
usually find copies of old poems reduced to the scribe's _own_
dialect; and it may easily happen that such a copy varies