!ay! mj trota conventos, mj leal verdadera! muchos te sigujan biua, muerta yazes señera; ¿ado te me han leuado? non cosa çertera; nunca torna con nueuas quien anda esta carrera. Cyerto, en parayso estas tu assentada, con dos martyres deues estar aconpañada, sienpre en este mundo fuste per dos maridada; ¿quien te me rrebato, vieja par mj sienpre lasrada?
The Archpriest adds an impudent epitaph on Trotaconventos, who is represented as saying that, though her mode of life was censurable, she made many a happy marriage; as begging all who visit her grave to say a _Pater Noster_ for her; and as wishing them in return the conjoint joys of both heavenly and earthly love. After this sally of blasphemous irony comes advice as to the arms which Christians should use against the devil, the world, and the flesh—a tedious exhortation from which the author breaks away to declare that he has always wished everything (including sermons) to be short, and with this he digresses into a panegyric on little women. But another March has come round, and, as usual, in the spring the Archpriest’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love. In default of the gifted Trotaconventos, he employs Don Furón, a liar, drunkard, thief, mischief-maker, gambler, bully, glutton, wrangler, blasphemer, fortune-teller, debauchee, trickster, fool and idler: apart from the defects inherent to these fourteen characters, Don Furón is as good a _fa tutto_ as one can hope to have. But he fails in the only embassy on which he is sent, and, with a good-humoured laugh at his own folly, the Archpriest narrates his last misadventure as a lover. With an elaborate exposition of the saintly sentiments which actuated the author (for whom every reader is entreated to say a _Pater Noster_ and an _Ave Maria_), the _Libro de buen amor_ ends. What seems to be a supplement contains seven poems addressed to the Virgin (a begging-song for poor students being interpolated between the second and third poem). The Salamanca manuscript closes with an amusingly impertinent composition in which a certain archpriest unnamed—possibly Juan Ruiz himself—is described as being sent by Don Gil Albornoz, the Archbishop of Toledo, with a brief from the Pope inculcating celibacy on the Dean and Chapter of Talavera. What follows has all the air of being a personal experience. The brief is no sooner read in church than the Dean is on his legs, threatening to resign rather than submit; the Treasurer wishes that he could lay hands on the meddling Archbishop, and both the Precentor Sancho and the Canon Don Gonzalo join in an indignant protest against the attempt to curtail clerical privileges. The Gayoso manuscript, which omits this _Cántica de los clérigos de Talavera_, includes two songs for blind men, and these are printed by M. Ducamin as a sort of last postscript to the _Libro de buen amor_.