It is obvious that these new lines are an afterthought, especially in the case of MS. Porkington, where the rime-word _þouȝte_ has to be repeated. Possibly these three texts depend upon a common original in which the usual second line _Erth hath gotyn vppon erth a dygnyte of noght_ was lacking, or MS. Egerton may have been the original of the other two. But MS. Harl. 1671 varies from the other two in the first line also, using a version which is otherwise confined to the Cambridge text-- Erthe apon erthe ys _waxyne and_ wrought-- and both it and MS. Porkington begin _erthe upon erthe_ like the later texts, as opposed to the more usual _erthe owte of erthe_, so that there is no clear evidence of a closer relationship between these three texts. In verse 4, again, an inversion of the customary order of the second or third lines is common to MSS. Rawl. C., Porkington, Maitland, Reidpeth, and the Stratford-on-Avon inscription, but the verse easily lends itself to transposition of the kind, and in MS. Rawl. C. the usual first line is also put third, so that the order of lines as compared with the normal arrangement becomes 2. 3. 1. 4. Beyond the self-evident fact that the Maitland and Reidpeth MSS. must be grouped together, no relationship of the MSS. can be deduced from this transposition, though it may point to a second popular version with inversion of lines 2 and 3. One of the most important differences of reading in the common stanzas occurs in the first line of the poem, where twelve of the eighteen MSS. read _erthe out of erthe_, while the remaining six, as well as the Cambridge text, have _erthe upon erthe_. Three of these six are definitely later transcripts: MS. Porkington is obviously a later modification of the original four-lined stanza, and MSS. Maitland and Reidpeth belong to the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries respectively; the beginning of MS. Harl. 984 is not preserved, and the remaining two texts, MSS. Selden and Harl. 1671, belong to c. 1450, while the Cambridge text, as will be shown later, cannot be regarded as original. Evidently _erthe owt of erthe_ was the original reading, but the version _erthe upon erthe_ was introduced early, and appears to have survived the other. A similar change occurs in the last line of verse 2, where MS. Harl. 1671 and the Stratford text substitute _erth upon erth_ for _out of_, _from_, _of_, of the other texts, and again in the third line of verse 4 (l. 2 in the texts mentioned above as transposing these lines) where the same two MSS. read _erth upon erth_ for the normal _erth unto_ (_into_, _to_) _erthe_; also in the fourth line of verse 7, where MSS. Harl. 4486, Lamb., Laud, Maitland, and Reidpeth read _upon_ for _owte of_. Now the last two lines of the first verse of the poem invariably use the phrase _erth upon erthe_, and it occurs repeatedly throughout the poem as a synonym for _man_: e.g. verse 2, line 1; 3, ll. 1, 3; 4, ll. 1, 2 (or 3); 5, l. 3; 6, ll. 1, 3; 7, l. 1.