“My flesh beg_u_n unto my soul in pain,”

Coleridge says—­

    “Either a misprint, or noticeable idiom of the word began: 
    Yes! and a very beautiful idiom it is:  the first colloquy or
    address of the flesh.”

The idiom is still in use in Scotland.  “You had better not begin to me,” is the first address or colloquy of the school-boy half-angry half-frightened at the bullying of a companion.  The idiom was once English, though now obsolete.  Several instances of it are given in the last edition of Foxe’s Martyrs, vol. vi. p. 627.  It has not been noticed, however, that the same idiom occurs in one of the best known passages of Shakspeare; in Clarence’s dream, Richard III., Act i.  Sc. 4.: 

  “O, then began the tempest to my soul.”

Herbert’s Poems will afford another illustration to Shakspeare, Hamlet, Act iv.  Sc. 7.:—­

  “And then this should is like a spendthrift sigh,
  That hurts by easing.”

Coleridge, in the Literary Remains, vol. i. p. 233., says—­

  “In a stitch in the side, every one must have heaved
  a sigh that hurts by easing.”

Dr. Johnson saw its true meaning: 

    “It is,” he says, “a notion very prevalent, that sighs impair
    the strength, and wear out the animal powers.”

In allusion to this popular notion, by no means yet extinct, Herbert says, p. 71.: 

  “Or if some years with it (a sigh) escape
  The sigh then only is
  A gale to bring me sooner to my bliss.”

D.S.

“Crede quod habes,” &c.—­The celebrated answer to a Protestant about the real presence, by the borrower of his horse, is supposed to be made since the Reformation, by whom I forget:—­

  “Quod nuper dixisti
  De corpore Christi
  Crede quod edis et edis;
  Sic tibi rescribo
  De tuo palfrido
  Crede quod habes et habes.”

But in Wright and Halliwell’s Reliquiae Antiquae, {264} p. 287., from a manuscript of the time of Henry VII., is given—­

  “Tu dixisti de corpore Christi, crede et habes
  De palefrido sic tibi scribo, crede et habes.”

M.

Grant to the Earl of Sussex of Leave to be covered in the Royal Presence.—­In editing Heylyn’s History of the Reformation, I had to remark of the grant made by Queen Mary to the Earl of Sussex, that it was the only one of Heylyn’s documents which I had been unable to trace elsewhere (ii. 90.).  Allow me to state in your columns, that I have since found it in Weever’s Funeral Monuments (pp. 635, 636).

J.C.  ROBERTSON.

Bekesbourne.

The first Woman formed from a Rib (Vol. ii., p. 213.).—­As you have given insertion to an extract of a sermon on the subject of the creation of Eve, I trust you will allow me to refer your correspondent BALLIOLENSIS to Matthew Henry’s commentary on the second chapter of Genesis, from which I extract the following beautiful explanation of the reason why the rib was selected as the material whereof the woman should be created:—­