But this way of destroying the feminine rhyme by the rhythmical accent certainly did not tally with the feeling of the mediæval poet; and it may be assumed that he accentuated _fídus_ exactly like Gotef_rídus_, as if it were a trochee. This at the same time agreed perfectly with the rhetorical accent of the word. Reading the whole verse according to the same principle, the first part of it, Métra tíbi fídus, became quite trochaic in character, and the idea of the hexameter is utterly destroyed. This destruction of the rhythmical principle in mediæval Latin poetry was almost contemporary with the same phenomenon in Teutonic literature. Here also the dominion of purely rhythmical measurement and alliteration was victoriously contested by rhyme and rhetorical accent. At the beginning of the middle-high-German period, alliteration as a principle of art disappeared; and by the great minnesingers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries it was used only occasionally, and without any strict rule, just as rhyme was by the old Roman poets. It was chiefly preserved in old alliterative formulæ, such as ‘Haus und Hof,’ or our ‘Kith and Kin.’ A beautiful example of this is found in the last stanza but one of the ‘Nibelunge Nôt’: Mit leide was verendet des künges hochgezît als ie diu _l_îbe _l_eide z’aller jungeste gît. Rhythmical accent, however, existed side by side with rhetorical accent much longer in German than in any of the Romance languages; and traces of its influence may be found almost till the beginning of the modern high-German epoch. In the Romance languages the decline of the rhythmical principle was even more complete than in the mediæval Latin or in any of the Teutonic idioms. The feeling for rhythm in those languages was so entirely lost that they were not able even to preserve the rhetorical accent in sufficient strength to make it of any avail for metrical purposes. Although in most of the poems written in the Romance languages there is a certain resemblance to the iambic or trochaic fall, yet the scanning of a whole stanza according to these metres would in most cases prove impossible. In modern French, which has gone farthest in neglecting the rhythmical difference between the syllables within the same word, there is scarcely a single line of the most finished poets which could be read metrically without altering even that remnant of rhetorical accent which has been preserved. In the following verse, taken from Boileau’s sixth Satire, Căr à peĭ_nē_ lĕs cōqs cŏm_m_ēnçănt leūr rămāgĕ,