cannot be said to maintain itself at the height of the oper.ing verse. The second points out the true author of Zion's cal.tmity; it is Jehovah, who hns fulfilled his threats of old, and turned r.,gainst his people like nn angry warrior. The fourth has more touches than the rest which reveal ( Bo far as picturesqueneRs of detail can be accepted as evidence) the hand of an eye-witness of the tragic events. The sufferings of various classes, due to God's anger at their sins, are affectingly described, and the malignant joy of the Edomites represented, not merely as a recollection (Ps. cmvii. 7), but as a present fact. The second and the fourth are generally considered the most striking of the elegies from a poetical point of view. Before introducing the question of authorship, we have still to examine briefly the two remaining poems-the third and the fifth. The former agrees with the three elegies already considered in the technical respect of its alphabetic structure, and more particularly with the second and fourth (in the order of the chapters), inasmuch as the same two initial letters are transposed. It is, again, connected with bhe first and second by the sub- division of each of its verses into three lines. It differs, however, from all the other elegies in its peculiar exaggeration of the alphabetic form, since it not merely distinguishes a single verse by one of the Hebrew letters, but a whole triplet of verses. This evidently hampers the poet in the expression of his thoughts ;-the third is the least rhythmical and the least poetical of all the Lamentations. In contents, too, it differs to a remarkable degree from the other elegies. Instead of describing the calamities of the nation, the writer points, or seems to point, to himself. "I am the man that bath seen affliction," he begins, and he continues to speak of himself as the great sufferer except in vers. 22--47, where he passes into a description of the circumstances of the nation, and only refers to himself as a member of the community (" Let us search and try our ways," etc.). His account of his own sufferings reminds us, by its highly colonred phraseology, of certain of the psalms which purport to be the utterances of an individual, but which contain many phrases which are hyperbolical in the mouth of an individual Israelite. In the case of this third Lamentation, as well as in that of this important group of psn,lms, we seem irresistibly driven to the inference that the writer (whether Jeremiah or another) adopts the role of a poetical representative of the Israelitish people, or at any rate of the pious believers who formed the kernel of that people. 1 This accounts for the curious alternation in eh. iii. of expressions which point to an individual Israelite with those which distinctly refer to the people, and for the seemingly extravagant character of the former, and also for the fondness which th.t author betrays for the great poem of Job, the hero of which is, in the inten- tion of the writer (to be carefully distinguished from the intention of the traditional narrative), obviously a type of the righteous man in afiliction.~ Compare, for :instance, eh. iii. 4 with Job xvi. 9, 10; eh. iii. 7, 9 with Job 1 • The Prophecies of IsaiC1h,' by the present writer, 2nd edit., vol. ii. pp. 18S-190. 1 Ibid., pp. 245-247. lV INTRODUCTION TO
:xix. 8: eh. iii. 8 with Job xxx. 20; eh. iii. 10 with Job x. l6; eh. iii. 12, 13 with Job vii. 20 and xvi. 12, 13; eh. iii. 14, 63 with Job xxx. 9. And if the writer of eh. iii. at one point does fall out of his assumed ri,ze, this too has to some extent a parallel in Job,~for both Job and his friends now and then "fall into language which implies that Job is not an indi- vidua.l, bat plurality of persons." Neither poet was able to keep up the personification, or representative symbol, with entire consistency. Before passing on to the second of the elegies reserved, we may, it would seem, draw one definite inference from the preceding data, viz. that the t.hird chapter of Lamentations is not by the author of eh. i., ii., iv. A similar result is obtained by an examination of the elegy which forms the fifth chapter. Turning to the Hebrew text, we n,re at once met by the fact that, unlike the companion elegies, it is not alphabetical, i.e. it does not make each of its verses begin with one of the Hebrew letters. Still, there is an approximation to the alphabetic form; the number of its verses (which are two-lined) is the same as that of the Hebrew letters, viz. twenty-two ( comp. Ps. xxxiii., xxx:viii., ciii.) It seems as if the close observance of the canons of alphabetic versification were too great a restriction for the writer of this elegy, just as some of the greatest English sonneteers have felt the laws of the Italian sonnet confine their freedom of thought and expression tlndnly. The treatment of the subject is slightly varied in this elegy, which is little more than an enumeration of the insults heaped upon the Jews by their enemies. The poet speaks near the end of the elegy (ver. 20) as if this sad state of things had already continued a long time, from which it has generally been inferred that the poem was composed rather later than the rest of the collection. We must remember, however, that, as J. H. Newman says- " . . . time is not a common property: But what is long is short, and swift is slow, And near is distant, e.s received and grasped By this mind and by that, and every one Is standard of his own chronology." (' The Dream of Gerontius,' p. 28.) To extreme grief, a few years might appear an age, and the short, simple sentences of which the poem consists have the ring of snch genuine feeling, neither dilnted by reflection nor overlaid by rhetoric, that we may well be reluctant to assume a very late date. They may conceivably have -been improvised in the midst of persecntion by one of the scanty remnant which remained in Judah even after the third deportation of exiles. Some of the writer's friends have sought refuge in Egypt (i.e. on the north-east frontier of Egypt, whither Jeremiah himself was carried by force, see Jer. xlii., xliv.); others have submitted to Assyria (a conventional term for the great Mesopotamian empire) ; the remainder of them are tyrannized over by upstarts of servile origin, such as many a modern Turkish pasha, placed over the land of Judah by the Babylonian suzerain. Yet so much relaxed are the bands of order, that savage, nomad tribes can venture to THE LAMENTATIONS OF JERJ,,MIAH.