And so, before the extant MSS. recorded the text, copyists and reciters may have added change to change, jumbling the speech of different men, generations, and places, and producing those 'mixed' texts which are the will-o'-the-wisps of language study. Faced with these perplexities, beginners might well echo the words of Langland's pilgrims in search of Truth: _This were a wikked way, but whoso hadde a gyde That wolde folwen vs eche a fote._ There is no such complete guide, for the first part of Morsbach's _Mittelenglische Grammatik_, Halle 1896, remains a splendid fragment, and Luick's _Historische Grammatik der englischen Sprache_, Leipzig 1914-, which promises a full account of the early periods, is still far from completion. Happily two distinguished scholars—Dr. Henry Bradley in _The Making of English_ and his chapter in _The Cambridge History of English Literature_, vol. i, Dr. O. Jespersen in _Growth and Structure of the English Language_—have given brief surveys of the whole early period which are at once elementary and authoritative. But for the details the student must rely on a mass of dissertations and articles of very unequal quality, supplemented by introductions to single texts, and, above all, by his own first-hand observations made on the texts themselves. Some preliminary considerations will be helpful, though perhaps not altogether reassuring: (i) A great part of the evidence necessary to a thorough knowledge of spoken Middle English has not come down to us, a considerable part remains unprinted, and the printed materials are so extensive and scattered that it is easy to overlook points of detail. For instance, it might be assumed from rimes in _Gawayne_, _Pearl_, and the Shropshire poet Myrc, that the falling together of OE. _-ang-_, _-ung-_, which is witnessed in NE. _among_ (OE. _gemang_), _-monger_ (OE. _mangere_), was specifically West Midland, if the occurrence of examples in Yorkshire (XVII 397-400) escaped notice. It follows that, unless a word or form is so common as to make the risk of error negligible, positive evidence—the certainty that it occurs in a given period or district—is immeasurably more important than negative evidence—the belief that it never did occur, or even the certainty that it is not recorded, in a period or district. For the same reason, the statement that a word or form is found 'in the early fourteenth century' or 'in Kent' should always be understood positively, and should not be taken to imply that it is unknown 'in the thirteenth century' or 'in Essex', as to which evidence may or may not exist.