.W.
Oxon.

_A Note on George Herbert's Poems._--In the notes by Coleridge attached
to Pickering's edition of George Herbert's _Poems_, on the line--

"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
elsewh