Consider ye, &c.— The first lamentations for the dead consisted only in the sudden bursts of insuppressible grief, like that of David over his son Absalom, 2 Samuel 19:4. But, as men grew refined, it was not deemed sufficient for the surviving relation to vent his sorrows in these natural and artless expressions of woe; but, unsatisfied with the genuine language of sighs and tears, he endeavoured not only to vent his sorrow by terms of grief, but likewise joined others as partners in his sorrow, and strove to extort tears from the surrounding crowd. This was practised by David in his lamentation for Abner, 2 Samuel 3:32-34. This ostentation of grief gave rise to the custom of hiring persons to weep at funerals, which the Phrygians and Greeks borrowed from the Hebrews. Women were generally employed on these occasions, either because it was an office more suitable to the softness of a female mind, or because, the tenderer passions being predominant in that sex, they succeeded better in their parts; nor were there ever wanting artists well instructed in the discipline of mourning, and ready to hire out their lamentations and tears on any emergency. It is the chief excellence of other arts to imitate nature; it was likewise esteemed so in this. Their funeral dirges, therefore, were composed in imitation of those which had been poured forth by genuine and sincere grief. Their sentences were short, querulous, pathetic, simple, and unadorned; somewhat laboured indeed, because they were composed in metre, and to be sung to the pipe, as we learn from Matthew 9:23 and from Homer, where, speaking of Hector's funeral, he says,
A melancholy choir attend around, With plaintive sighs, and music's solemn sound: Alternately they sing, alternate flow Th' obedient tears, melodious in their woe. See POPE'S ILIAD, Book 24. ver. 900 and the Note.
St. Jerome tells us, that even to his time this custom continued in Judaea; that women at funerals, with dishevelled hair and naked breasts, endeavoured in a modulated voice to unite others in lamentation with them. There are several traces of this custom to be met with among the prophets, who frequently delivered their predictions of approaching calamities, not without a singular elegance, in the form of funeral dirges. The poem before us, from this to the 22nd verse, is both an illustration and confirmation of what has been delivered upon this subject, and worthy of the reader's frequent perusal, on account of its affecting pathos, moral sentiments, and fine images; particularly in the 21st verse, where death is described in as animated a prosopopoeia as can be conceived. See Lowth's 22nd Prelection, and Calmet.