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.:

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

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

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.:

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:—