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The French 'rossignol, a nightingale, is undoubtedly the Latin 'lusciniola, the diminutive of 'luscinia, with the alteration, so frequent in the Romance languages, of the commencing 'l' into 'r. Whatever may be the etymology of 'luscinia, it is plain that for Frenchmen in general the word would no longer suggest any meaning at all, hardly even for French scholars, after the serious transformations which it had undergone; while yet, at the same time, in the exquisitely musical 'rossignol, and still more perhaps in the Italian 'usignuolo, there is an evident intention and endeavour to express something of the music of the bird's song in the liquid melody of the imitative name which it bears; and thus to put a new soul into the word, in lieu of that other which had escaped.
In describing her singing he quotes part of a Latin letter which he himself had written to a friend upon first hearing her; and it is a curious proof of the readiness of Sheridan, notwithstanding his own fertility, to avail himself of the thoughts of others, that we find in this extract, word for word, the same extravagant comparison of the effects of music to the process of Egyptian embalmment "extracting the brain through the ears" which was afterwards transplanted into the dialogue of the Duenna: "Mortuum quondam ante aegypti medici quam pollincirent cerebella de auribus unco quodam hamo solebant extrahere; sic de meis auribus non cerebrum, sed cor ipsum exhausit lusciniola, &c., &c."
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