To the emperor, and to give him counsel.
“You know, Cæsar, our affections are closely bound together,
For either body holds the two souls,
Alas! fly Provence the strong, fly the bitter shore,
Take care that your great glory prove not an injury to you.”
Thus Leyva goes on to persuade the emperor to abandon his enterprise, and then dies. Arena exults over his death, and over the emperor’s grief for his loss, and then proceeds to describe the disastrous retreat of the imperial army, and the glory of France in her king.
Antonius de Arena wrote with vigour and humour, but his verses are tame in comparison with his model, Folengo. The taste for macaronic verse never took strong root in France, and the few obscure writers who attempted to shine in that kind of composition are now forgotten, except by the laborious bibliographer. One named Jean Germain, wrote a macaronic history of the invasion of Provence by the imperialists in rivalry of Arenas. I will not follow the taste for this class of burlesque composition into Spain or Germany, but merely add that it was not adopted in England until the beginning of the seventeenth century, when several authors employed it at about the same time. The most perfect example of these early English macaronics is the “Polemo-Middiana,” i.e. battle of the dunghill, by the talented and elegant-minded Drummond of Hawthornden. We may take a single example of the English macaronic from this poem, which will not need an English translation. One of the female characters in the dunghill war, calls, among others, to her aid—
Hunc qui dirtiferas tersit cum dishclouty dishras,
Hunc qui gruelias scivit bene lickere plettas,
Et saltpannifumos, et widebricatos fisheros,