assonance of FER TER FER TER: "Shaking his head, he replied, 'It is not your hot words that terrify me, fierce though you are; it is the gods who terrify me, and Jupiter my enemy!" Decline of alliteration Tastes in alliteration gradually changed, and some writers, such as Plautus, Ennius, Lucretius, and Virgil, used it much more freely than others such as Catullus or Horace. From the first century AD it became less common. The scholar Servius (c.400), who wrote a commentary on Virgil, commented on the triple alliteration of Aeneid 3.183 ( "Cassandra used to sing of these events") and similar phrases: "This style of composition is now considered a fault, although our ancestors liked it". He also disapproved of phrases such as (Aeneid 2.27) in which the final syllable of a word was repeated in the next word. A few years later Martianus Capella (fl. 410-20) wrote: "It is a very great fault in composition not to avoid the constant use of a letter repeated ad nauseam." Alliteration in Anglo-Latin poetry From the 7th century onwards English scholars began writing poetry in Latin, beginning with Aldhelm, Abbot of Malmesbury in Wiltshire. Imitating and perhaps even exceeding the type of alliteration familiar in Old English, poems were written such as the following, attributed to Aldhelm himself, which displays both major and minor alliteration: "A whirlwind was coming over the land with smooth hailstones, which in throngs from the sky are sieved by the black clouds." Aldhelm also used alliteration in many of his hexameter lines, such as the following: "while Titan (= the sun) traverses the lands with his slanting beam" Lapidge (1979) discusses where exactly alliteration should be sought: at the beginning of the word, on the stressed syllable, or on the verse ictus. However, these questions still remain largely unanswered. Another highly alliterative work produced in England is the ("Melody of Love") written about 1330 by the Yorkshire mystic Richard Rolle. An excerpt of this work, which is written in prose, but with some characteristics of verse, is the following: "But I fell in love with a Beloved, on whom the Angels of the Omnipotent pant to gaze. And Mary, the miraculous mother of mercy, I was caressing to myself in honey-flowing softness." The same author's is a shorter poem written in alliterative verse. At about the same time as Richard Rolle wrote this, an Alliterative Revival