Serenades were as common an expedient among the Roman gallants of the days of Augustus as among their modern successors. In the fine climate of Greece, Italy, and Spain, they were a natural growth, and involved no great strain upon a wooer's endurance. They assume a very different aspect under a northern sky, where young Absolute, found by his Lydia Languish "in the garden, in the coldest night in January, stuck like a dripping statue," presents a rather lugubrious spectacle. Horace (Odes, III. 7) warns the fair Asteriè, during the absence of her husband abroad, to shut her ears against the musical nocturnes of a certain Enipeus:--
"At nightfall shut your doors, nor then. Look down into the street again, When quavering fifes complain;"
using almost the words of Shylock to his daughter Jessica:--
"Lock up my doors; and when you hear the drum _And the vile squeaking of the wrynecked fife_, Clamber not you up to the casement then, Nor thrust your head into the public street."
The name given to such a serenade, adopted probably, with the serenades themselves, from Greece, was _paraclausithyron_--literally, an out-of-door lament. Here is a specimen of what they were (Odes, III. 10), in which, under the guise of imitating their form, Horace quietly makes a mock of the absurdity of the practice. His serenader has none of the insensibility to the elements of the lover in the Scotch song:--
"Wi' the sleet in my hair, I'd gang ten miles and mair, For a word o' that sweet lip o' thine, o' thine, For ae glance o' thy dark e'e divine."
Neither is there in his pleading the tone of earnest entreaty which marks the wooer, in a similar plight, of Burns's "Let me in this ae nicht"--
"Thou hear'st the winter wind and weet, Nae star blinks through the driving sleet; Tak pity on my weary feet, And shield me frae the rain, jo."
There can be no mistake as to the seriousness of this appeal. Horace's is a mere _jeu-d'esprit_:--
"Though your drink were Tanais, chillest of rivers, And your lot with some conjugal savage were cast, You would pity, sweet Lycè, the poor soul that shivers Out here at your door in the merciless blast.
"Only hark how the doorway goes straining and creaking, And the piercing wind pipes through the trees that surround The court of your villa, while Hack frost is streaking With ice the crisp snow that lies thick on the ground!