[561]. Æn., X. 473 ff.
[562]. Perhaps best in Mr. and Mrs. S. C. Hall’s Ireland: its Scenery, Character, etc., 3 vols., London, 1841-1843. See I. 222 ff. The authors mention the women who wept over Hector, with the odd explanation that the Greeks were once in Ireland. Other accounts of Irish funerals are quoted in Brand-Ellis, Popular Antiquities, as of “the men, women, and children” who go before the corpse and “set up a most hideous Holoo, loo, loo, which may be heard two or three miles round the country.”
[563]. Quoted by J. C. Walker, Historical Memoirs of the Irish Bards, London, 1786, pp. 20 f. The keening of women who follow the hearse, dressed sometimes in white and sometimes in black, “singing as they slowly proceed ... extempore odes,” is sufficiently like the march of the praeficae at a Roman funeral; and in neither case has one the primitive form of the rite.
[564]. Transact. Royal Irish Academy, IV., “Antiquities,” pp. 41 ff., read December, 1791.
[565]. “Present State of Ireland,” Works, ed. Morris, pp. 625 f. Camden, about the same time, Britannia, trans., ed. 1722, p. xix, speaks of the bards as men who “besides ... their poetic functions do apply themselves particularly to the study of genealogies.” See also Evan Evans, Specimens of the Poetry of the Antient Welsh Bards, ... London, 1764, p. 91. This is not primitive song.
[566]. Spenser, p. 633.
[567]. “Totenklagen in der litauischen Volksdichtung,” Zst. f. vgl. Litteraturgesch., N. F., II. 81 ff.
[568]. A similar series of questions, with interesting details of the ceremony, is given in the Itinera Constantinopolitanum et Amasianum ab Angerio Gislenio Busbequij ... Antverpiæ, 1681, p. 28: “deuertimus in pagum Semianorum Iagodnam: ubi ejus gentis ritus funebres vidimus multum à nostris abhorrentes. Erat cadauer in templo positum detecta facie: iuxtà erant apposita edulia, panis et caro et vini cantharus: adstabant coniunx et filia melioribus ornata vestibus, filiae galerius erat ex plumis pavonis. Supremum munus, quo maritum jam conclamatum uxor donauit, pileolum fuit purpureum, cuius modi virgines nubiles illic gestare solent. Inde lessum audiuimus et naeniam lamentabilesque voces; quibus mortuum percunctabantur quid de eo tantum meruissent, quae res, quod obsequium, quod solatium ei defuisset; cur se solas et miseras relinqueret: et hujus generis alia.”
[569]. Compare the pathetic word of David about his dead child: 2 Sam., xii. 23.