Notes and Queries, Number 47, September 21, 1850

Audi quid Echo resonet
Subterraneæ Romæ!
Obscura licet Urbis Coemetria
Totius patens Orbis Theatrium!
Supplex Loci Sanetitatem venerare,
Et post hac sub luto aurum
Coelum sub coeno
Sub Româ Romam quærito!"

Roma Subterranea, 1651, tom. i. p. 625.

(Inscription abridged.)

Stay, wayfarer—behold
In ev'ry mould'ring bone a trophy here.
In all these hosts of martyrs,
So many triumphs.
These vaults—these countless tombs,
E'en in their very silence
Proclaim aloud Rome's glory:
The echo'd fame
Of subterranean Rome
Rings on the ear.
The city's sepulchres, albeit hidden,
Present a spectacle
To the wide world patent.
In lowly rev'rence hail this hallow'd spot,
And henceforth learn
Gold beneath dross
Heav'n below earth,
Rome under Rome to find!

    F.T.J.B.
Brookthorpe.

Parallel Passages.—

"There is an acre sown with royal seed, the copy of the greatest change from rich to naked, from cieled roofs to arched coffins, from living like gods to die like men."—Jeremy Taylor's Holy Dying, chap. i. sect. 1. p. 272. ed. Edin.

"Here's an acre sown indeed
With the richest royalest seeds,
That the earth did e'er suck in,
Since the first man dyed for sin:
Here the bones of birth have cried,
Though gods they were, as men they died."
F. BEAUMONT

    M.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 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
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 Reliquiæ Antiquæ, 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.