Cres. Eh? well, perhaps so; I’ll leave his punishment to you.
With which now this true story ends—
Pardon its many errors, friends.
Mr. Ticknor thinks Calderon took the hint of this play from Lope de Vega’s ‘Wise Man at Home’; and he quotes (though without noticing this coincidence) a reply of Lope’s hero to some one advising him to assume upon his wealth, that is much of a piece with Crespo’s answer to Juan on a like score in the first act of this piece. Only that in Lope the answer is an answer: which, as Juan says, in Calderon it is not; so likely to happen with a borrowed answer.
This is Mr. Ticknor’s version from the older play:
He that was born to live in humble state
Makes but an awkward knight, do what you will.
My father means to die as he has lived,
The same plain collier that he always was;
And I too must an honest ploughman die.