The reading of the ancients awakened new delight in the melody and beauty of language: men became intoxicated with words.

The practice of rhetoric was universal and it quickly coloured all literature.

It was the habit of the rhetoricians to choose some subject for declamation and round it to encourage their pupils to set embellishments and decorations, which commonly proceeded rather from a delight in language for language's sake, than from any effect in enforcing an argument.

Their models for these exercises can be traced in their influence on later writers.

One of the most popular of them, Erasmus's "Discourse Persuading a Young Man to Marriage," which was translated in an English text-book of rhetoric, reminds one of the first part of Shakespeare's sonnets.