It was about the year 1200 that the remarkable work appeared that is known by the name of _The Ormulum_, written in the North-East Midland of Lincolnshire, which is the first clear example of the form which our literary language was destined to assume. It is an extremely long and dreary poem of about 10,000 long lines, written in a sadly monotonous unrimed metre; and it contains an introduction, paraphrases relating to the gospels read in the church during the year, and homilies upon the same. It was named _Ormulum_ by the author after his own name, which was Orm; and the sole existing MS. is probably in the handwriting of Orm himself, who employed a phonetic spelling of his own invention which he strongly recommends. Owing to this circumstance and to the fact that his very regular metre leaves no doubt as to his grammatical forms, this otherwise uninviting poem has a high philological value. In my book entitled _The Chaucer Canon_, published at Oxford in 1900, I quote 78 long lines from the _Ormulum_, reduced to a simpler system of spelling, at pp. 9-14; and, at pp. 15-18, I give an analysis of the suffixes employed by Orm to mark grammatical inflexions. At pp. 30-41, I give an analysis of similar inflexions as employed by Chaucer, who likewise employed the East Midland dialect, but with such slight modifications of Orm's language as were due to his living in London instead of Lincolnshire, and to the fact that he wrote more than 150 years later. The agreement, as to grammatical usages, of these two authors is extremely close, allowing for lapse of time; and the comparison between them gives most indubitable and valuable results. There is no better way of learning Chaucer's grammar. As East Midland was spread over a wide area, there are, as might be expected, some varieties of it. The dialects of Lincolnshire and of Norfolk were not quite the same, and both differed somewhat from that of Essex and Middlesex; but the general characteristics of all three sub-dialects are very much alike. As time went on, the speech of the students of Oxford and Cambridge was closely assimilated to that of the court as held in London; and this "educated" type was naturally that to which Caxton and the great writers of the sixteenth century endeavoured to conform.