objection to the performance of observances at funerals, other than such as were approved by ecclesiastical sanction. The custom in question bears an obvious affinity to Highland coronachs and Irish keens, and here in England there is reason to believe it to have survived as late as the seventeenth century. That Shakespeare was well acquainted with it is amply testified by the fourth act of _Cymbeline_; for it is plain that the song pronounced by Guiderius and Arviragus over the supposed corpse of Imogene was no mere poetic outburst of regret, but a real and legitimate dirge, the singing or saying of which was held to constitute Fidele's obsequies. In the Cotton Library there is a MS., having reference to a Yorkshire village in the reign of Elizabeth, which relates: "When any dieth, certaine women sing a song to the dead bodie recyting the jorney that the partye deceased must goe." Unhappily the English Neniae are nearly all lost and forgotten; I know of no genuine specimen extant, except the famous Lyke Wake (_i.e._, Death Watch) dirge beginning: This ae nighte, this ae nighte, _Everie nighte and alle_, Fire and sleete and candle lighte, _And Christe receive thy saule_, &c. To the present day we find practices closely analogous with those recounted in the _Iliad_ scattered here and there from the shores of the Mediterranean to the banks of Lake Onega; and the Trojan threnody is even now reproduced in Ireland, in Corsica, Sardinia, and Roumania, in Russia, in Greece, and South Italy. Students who may be tempted to make observations on this strange survival of the old world, will do well, however, to set about it at once, in parts which are either already invaded or else threatened with an imminent invasion of railways, for the screech of the engine sounds the very death-knell of ancient customs. Thus the Irish practice of keening is becoming less and less general. On recently making inquiries of a gentleman residing in Leinster, I learnt that it had gone quite out in that province; he added that he had once seen keeners at a funeral at Clonmacnoise (King's County), but was told they came from the Connaught side of the Shannon. The keens must not be confused with the peculiar wail or death-cry known as the Ullagone; they are articulate utterances, in a strongly marked rhythm, extolling the merits of the dead, and reproaching him for leaving his family, with much more in the same strain. The keeners may or may not be professional, and the keens are more often of a traditional than of an improvised description. One or two specimens in Gaelic have appeared in the _Journal of the Irish Archaeological Association_, but on the whole the subject is far from having received the attention it deserves. The Irish keeners are invariably women, as also are all the continental dirge-singers of modern times. Whether by reason of the somewhat new-fashioned sentiment which forbids a man to exhibit his feelings in public,