The mere examination of an Early English work with respect to its vocabulary and grammatical forms, will not enable us (as Price asserts) to settle satisfactorily the date at which it was written. The place of composition must also be taken into consideration, and a comparison, if possible, must be made with other works in the same dialect, the date of which is known with some degree of certainty. The date of the text before us must not, therefore, be confounded with that of the manuscript, which is, perhaps, a few years earlier than A.D. 1300. A careful comparison of the poem with the Bestiary, written in the same dialect, and most probably by the same author[9] (and printed by Mr Wright in the Reliquiæ Antiquæ, p. 208, and by myself in an Old English Miscellany), leads me to think that the present poem is not later than A.D. 1250.[10] The vocabulary, which contains very few words of Romance origin,[11] is not that of Robert of Gloucester, or of Robert of Brunne, but such as is found in Laȝamon's Brut, or Orm's paraphrases, and other works illustrating the second period of our language, i.e. the twelfth and earlier part of the thirteenth centuries. The employment of a _dual_ for the pronouns of the first and second persons marks an _early_ date (certainly not much later than the time of Henry III.) even in works composed in the Southern dialect, which, it is well known, retained to a comparatively late period those Anglo-Saxon inflections that had long previously been disused in more Northern dialects. The Corpus manuscript is evidently the work of a scribe, to whom the language was more or less archaic, which accounts for such blunders as _ðrosing_ for _ðrosem_, _waspene_ for _wastme_, _lage_ for _vn-lage_, _insile_ for _vn-sile_, _grauen_ for _ðrauen_, etc. The original copy of Genesis most probably terminated with ll. 2521-4: "And here ended completely The book which is called Genesis, Which Moses, through God's help, Wrote for precious souls' need." The concluding lines, in which both the author and scribe are mentioned, seem to me to be the work of a subsequent transcriber: "God shield his soul from hell-bale, Who made it thus in English tale (speech)! And he that these letters wrote, May God help him blissfully, And preserve his soul from sorrow and tears, Of hell-pain, cold and hot!" The Ormulum is the earliest[12] printed Early English work which has come down to us that exhibits the uniform employment of the termination _-en_ (_-n_) as the inflection of the plural number, present tense, indicative mood; or, in other words, it is the earliest printed example we have of a _Midland_ dialect. I say _a_ Midland dialect, because the work of Orm is, after all, only a specimen of _one_ variety of the Midland speech, most probably of that spoken in the northern part of the eastern counties of England, including what is commonly called the district of East Anglia.