DIALECTS IN EARLY TIMES The history of our dialects in the earliest periods of which we have any record is necessarily somewhat obscure, owing to the scarcity of the documents that have come down to us.

The earliest of these have been carefully collected and printed in one volume by Dr Sweet, entitled _The Oldest English Texts_, edited for the Early English Text Society in 1885.

Here we already find the existence of no less than four dialects, which have been called by the names of Northumbrian, Mercian, Wessex (or Anglo-Saxon), and Kentish.

These correspond, respectively, though not quite exactly, to what we may roughly call Northern, Midland, Southern, and Kentish.

Whether the limits of these dialects were always the same from the earliest times, we cannot tell; probably not, when the unsettled state of the country is considered, in the days when repeated invasions of the Danes and Norsemen necessitated constant efforts to repel them.