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! "In your pride--Venus hates it--no longer envelop ye, Or haply you'll find yourself laid on the shelf; You never were made for a prudish Penelope, 'Tis not in the blood of your sires or yourself. "Though nor gifts nor entreaties can win a soft answer, Nor the violet pale of my love-ravaged cheek, To your husband's intrigue with a Greek ballet-dancer, Though you still are blind, and forgiving and meek; "Yet be not as cruel--forgive my upbraiding-- As snakes, nor as hard as the toughest of oak; To stand out here, drenched to the skin, serenading All night may in time prove too much of a joke." It is not often that Horace's poetry is vitiated by bad taste. Strangely enough, almost the only instances of it occur where he is writing of women, as in the Ode to Lydia (Book I. 25) and to Lyce (Book IV. 13). Both ladies seem to have been, former favourites of his, and yet the burden of these poems is exultation in the decay of their charms. The deadening influence of mere sensuality, and of the prevalent low tone of morals, must indeed have been great, when a man "so singularly susceptible," as Lord Lytton has truly described him, "to amiable, graceful, gentle, and noble impressions of man and of life," could write of a woman whom he had once loved in a strain like this:--