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 *M…