Withal, individual success apart, the Spanish utterance of Latin teased the finer ear. Cicero ridiculed the accent—_aliquid pingue_—of even the more lettered Spaniards who reached Rome; Martial, retired to his native Bilbilis, shuddered lest he might let fall a local idiom; and Quintilian, a sterner purist than a very Roman, frowned at the intrusion of his native provincialisms upon the everyday talk of the capital. In Rome incorrections of speech were found where least expected. That Catullus should jeer at Arrius—the forerunner of a London type—in the matter of aspirates is natural enough; but even Augustus distressed the nice grammarian. _A fortiori_, Hadrian was taunted with his Spanish solecisms. Innovation won the day. The century between Livy and Tacitus shows differences of style inexplicable by the easy theory of varieties of temperament; and the two centuries dividing Tacitus from St. Augustine are marked by changes still more striking. This is but another illustration of the old maxim, that as the speed of falling bodies increases with distance, so literary decadences increase with time. As in Italy and Africa, so in Spain. The statelier _sermo urbanus_ yielded to the _sermo plebeius_. Spanish soldiers had discovered "the fatal secret of empire, that emperors could be made elsewhere than at Rome"; no less fatal was the discovery that Latin might be spoken without regard for Roman models. As the power of classic forms waned, that of ecclesiastical examples grew. Church Latin of the fourth century shines at its best in the verse of the Christian poet, the Spaniard Prudentius: with him the classical rhythms persist—as survivals. He clutches at, rather than grasps, the Roman verse tradition, and, though he has no rhyming stanzas, he verges on rhyme in such performances as his _Hymnus ad Galli Cantum_. Throughout the noblest period of Roman poetry, soldiers, sailors, and illiterates had, in the _versus saturnius_, preserved a native rhythmical system not quantitative but accentual; and this vulgar metrical method was to outlive its fashionable rival. It is doubtful whether the quantitative prosody, brought from Greece by literary dandies, ever flourished without the circle of professional men of letters. It is indisputable that the imported metrical rules, depending on the power of vowels and the position of consonants, were gradually superseded by looser laws of syllabic quantity wherein accent and tonic stress were the main factors.