Mintage of man

Could someone PLEASE answer me on this one? It's killing me. I can't sleep at night... Who coined the phrase "coined the phrase"?
Becky

Here's all I know:

COIN A PHRASE, TO - "To invent a phrase, which if it is apt or imaginative may gain currency, and become popular generally. Today this phrase is mostly used ironically to accompany a banal remark or cliché. 'Who, to coin a phrase, would have thought of meeting you?' Ngaio Marsh: Hand in Glove, ch iv " From Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable revised by Adrian Room (HarperCollinsPublishers, New York, 1999, Sixteenth Edition).

This sounds Shakespearian to me. I did find this:

CORIOLANUS How! no more!
As for my country I have shed my blood,
Not fearing outward force, so shall my lungs
Coin words till their decay against those measles,
Which we disdain should tatter us, yet sought
The very way to catch them.

...which is close to coining coined the phrase.

Well found, ESC! Here's another poetic use of coin, again from A. E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad, this time XXIII, The lads in their hundreds. This is one of my favourite verses.

But now you may stare as you like and there's nothing to scan;
And brushing your elbow unguessed-at and not to be told
They carry back bright to the coiner the mintage of man,
The lads that will die in their glory and never be old.

Gary's the hero. He found the Shakespearian connection.