There is, however, another historical event which had a far more universal and direct bearing on English words, and that is the Revival of Learning. The new intercourse with the ancient literatures of Greece and Rome naturally brought into English a positive stream of “literary borrowings”. At first these were mostly Latin words. If we try to imagine an English from which such words as _accommodate_, _capable_, _capacious_, _compute_, _corroborate_, _distinguish_, _efficacy_, _estimate_, _experiment_, _insinuate_, _investigate_, and a host of others equally common are as yet absent, we may partly realize what an important part was played by the Renaissance in producing the language in which we speak and think. There is indeed good evidence that the stream of new words flowed too fast at this time for ordinary people to keep up with it. For instance, many of the Latin words that were borrowed have since fallen out of use. At the beginning of the seventeenth century Francis Bacon, who is not a fantastic writer, was using such unfamiliar expressions as _contentation_, _contristation_, _digladiation_, _morigeration_, _redargution_, _ventosity_, ... and somewhat before this, when the Classical influx was at its height, it was conspicuous enough to call forth several amusing parodies. We remember Shakespeare’s Holofernes in _Love’s Labour’s Lost_, and Sir Thomas Wilson includes in his _Arte of Rhetorike_ a fictitious letter applying for a church benefice, in which he satirizes as follows the Klondyke rush after fashionable Latinity: Pondering, expending, and revoluting with myself, your ingent affability, and ingenious capacity for mundane affairs: I cannot but celebrate and extoll your magnifical dexterity above all other. For how could you have adepted such illustrate prerogative, and domestical superiority, if the fecundity of your ingeny had not been so fertile and wonderful pregnant?...