There are other influences, too, that must be taken into account. _Discovery_ (it was a new word) was in the very air of sixteenth-century England. From the West came tidings of a new world; from the East news yet more marvellous of an old one; and the rebirth of Science was, in its infancy, but a single aspect of that larger Renaissance which played such an important part in moulding the subsequent life and outlook of Europe. Italy had felt the shock first, and we have a special group of words in our language to remind us of the visual arts in which the new impulse drove her to excel. _Cameo_, _cupola_, _fresco_, and _model_ all reached us in the sixteenth century from or through the Italian, and the next saw the arrival of _attitude_, _bust_, _chiaroscuro_, _dado_, _dome_, _filigree_, _intaglio_, _mezzotinto_, and _pastel_. If these are of a somewhat technical nature, words like _antic_, _canto_, _capriole_, _galligaskins_, _sonnet_, and _stanza_ build a bridge in the imagination from Renaissance Italy to Tudor England, and _ducat_, _incarnadine_, and _madonna_ are three Italian words with pleasant Shakespearian associations. They remind us, too, that by the time the Renaissance reached England it was already in full swing. No wonder the literary world was swept off its feet. First-hand acquaintance with the works of Classical writers gradually substituted an affectionate, an almost passionate, familiarity for that religious awe with which the Middle Ages had honoured their garbled translations. One of the first results—an immediate and violent intellectual revolt against the Schoolmen and all things connected with them—is faithfully preserved to us in the unenviable immortality achieved about this time by the luckless Duns Scotus, whose patronymic has given us _dunce_. The history of the word _conceit_, which in Chaucer merely meant ‘anything conceived’, tells its tale of the wild, undiscriminating rush after elegance of thought and diction. By Shakespeare’s time the tasteless habit of piling fanciful conceit upon conceit had already become a thing to parody, the merest affectation of wit, and so the word lives to-day chiefly as a synonym for personal vanity, the language having been obliged by its degradation to re-borrow the Latin original ‘conceptus’ in the more exact form of _concept_.