"My flesh begun 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