"Ferdin. ….but he has never sullied his honor, which, with his title, has outlived his means.
"Jerome. Have they? More shame for them!—What business have honor or titles to survive, when property is extinct? Nobility is but as a helpmate to a good fortune, and, like a Japanese wife, should perish on the funeral pile of the estate!"
In the first act, too, (scene 3) where Jerome abuses the Duenna, there is an equally unaccountable omission of a sentence, in which he compares the old lady's face to "parchment, on which Time and Deformity have engrossed their titles."
Though some of the poetry of this opera is not much above that ordinary kind, to which music is so often doomed to be wedded—making up by her own sweetness for the dulness of her help-mate—by far the greater number of the songs are full of beauty, and some of them may rank among the best models of lyric writing. The verses, "Had I a heart for falsehood framed," notwithstanding the stiffness of this word "framed," and one or two other slight blemishes, are not unworthy of living in recollection with the matchless air to which they are adapted.
There is another song, less known, from being connected with less popular music, which, for deep, impassioned feeling and natural eloquence, has not, perhaps, its rival, through the whole range of lyric poetry. As these verses, though contained in the common editions of The Duenna, are not to be found in the opera, as printed in the British Theatre, and, still more strangely, are omitted in the late Collection of Mr. Sheridan's Works, [Footnote: For this Edition of his Works I am no further responsible than in having communicated to it a few prefatory pages, to account and apologize to the public for the delay of the Life.] I should feel myself abundantly authorized in citing them here, even if their beauty were not a sufficient excuse for recalling them, under any circumstances, to the recollection of the reader:—
"Ah, cruel maid, how hast thou changed
The temper of my mind!
My heart, by thee from love estrang'd,
Becomes, like thee, unkind.
"By fortune favor'd, clear in fame,
I once ambitious was;
And friends I had who fann'd the flame,
And gave my youth applause.
"But now my weakness all accuse,
Yet vain their taunts on me;
Friends, fortune, fame itself I'd lose,
To gain one smile from thee.
"And only thou should'st not despise
My weakness or my woe;
If I am mad in others' eyes,
'Tis thou hast made me so.
"But days, like this, with doubting curst,
I will not long endure—
Am I disdain'd—I know the worst,
And likewise know my cure.