“Asseveration blustering in your face Makes contradiction such a hopeless case; In every tale they tell, or false or true, Well-known, or such as no man ever knew, They fix attention, heedless of your pain, With oaths like rivets forced into the brain; And e’en when sober truth prevails throughout, They swear it, till affirmance breeds a doubt.” The imprecation of Corneille’s Dorante, _Que le foudre à vos yeux m’écrase si je mens!_ only evokes from Clarice the contemptuous rebuff, _Un menteur_ [which, and more than which, emphatically, Dorante is, for he is _Le Menteur_,] _est toujours prodigue de serments_. So again Racine’s Theseus: _Toujours les scélérats ont recours au parjure_,—when Hippolytus begins to call heaven, and earth, and universal nature to witness, etc. So, too, Chamont, in Otway’s tragedy: “When a man talks of love, with caution trust him; but if he swears, he’ll certainly deceive thee.” Indeed, as Owen Feltham has it, wherever there is too much profession, there is cause for suspicion. “Reality cares not to be tricked out with too taking an outside; and deceit, when she intends to cozen, studies disguise. Least of all should we be taken with swearing asseverations. Truth needs not the varnish of an oath to make her plainness credited.” Fielding’s Pettifogger, on a certain occasion, calling to mind that he had not been sworn, as he usually was, before he gave his evidence, “now bound what he had declared with so many oaths and imprecations, that the landlady’s ears were shocked, and she put a stop to his swearing, by assuring him of her belief,” inconsiderately enough, as the manner of the man might have proved. Scott’s Jorworth, when heaping asseveration on asseveration, is cut short by the honest Fleming he is striving to mislead: “Stop, good Jorworth; thou heapest thine oaths too thickly on each other, for me to value them to the right estimate; that which is so lightly pledged, is sometimes thought not worth redeeming.” So again Monkbarns tells the gaberlunzie, after hearing his story of the adept, “I am strongly disposed to believe that you have spoken the truth, the rather, that you have not made any of those obtestations of the superior powers, which I observe you and your comrades always make use of when you mean to deceive folks.” The author of “London Labour and the London Poor,” recounts the redundance of “Glory be to God! it’s the thruth I’m telling of you, sir,” etc., etc.; which he had to hear from Irish mendicity, or mendacity, or both. “The dignity of truth is lost with much protesting,” the Cicero of Jonson’s “Catiline” says.