It would almost seem, from the evidence of the several passages we have had occasion to refer to, as if the various diversities of character and occupation had engendered a spirit of competition in the assumption of oaths. Whether scholar or soldier, knight or citizen, each man, according to his degree, is burning to distinguish himself by some distinctive and eccentric form of swearing. The asseverations employed by the Shallows and Slanders are as limpid and as timorous as those of Falstaff and Bardolph are downright and headstrong. Hotspur, as we have seen, reproaches Lady Percy for swearing like a comfit-maker's wife. With the rest of the Percies he had lived in Aldersgate Street, and had probably contracted an aversion to everything savouring of the vulgar life of a great city. How defiant and versatile were the expletives of the old French nobility, we may learn from the pages of Brantome. When seeking to convey a flattering portrait of his father, Francois de Bourdeilles, he does not omit to impress us with the importance of his oaths. Playing backgammon with Pope Jules II., his form of adjuration was _Chardieu benit!_ when he lost, and _Chardon benit!_ when he won. In Elizabethan England a ridiculous notion prevailed among town society, associating the idea of good breeding with the use, by way of oath, of the word "protest." Such an affirmation was understood to raise the presumption of quality in the person who used it. Says Carlo Buffone, "Ever, when you can, have two or three peculiar oaths to swear by, that no man else swears, and above all protest." Neither is Shakespeare silent upon this fashionable eccentricity. The Nurse in 'Romeo and Juliet' is instantly won over to the side of the Veronese lover the moment he utters "I protest," and no longer harbours a doubt of his principles. We see her desirous of communicating to her mistress this single expression of gentlemanhood without concerning herself about the more weighty portion of Romeo's message. This is, perhaps, almost beneath the dignity of the love-story, but we have to regard it as a relic. We must understand the allusion as a piece of chaff administered to the gallants and templars who sported their fine clothes and broached their oaths and their jests seated upon the very stage where the performers were playing. A passage in a contemporary, entitled 'Sir Giles Goosecap,' affords a key to the especial estimation in which the term then happened to be held:--"There is not the best duke's son in France dares say _I protest_ till he be one-and-thirty years old at least, for the inheritance of that word is not to be possessed before."