Above all, as happens to a great many, let not desire for temporary praise keep our orator from having an eye to the interest of the cause he has undertaken.  For as generals in waging wars do not always march their armies over pleasant plains, but often must climb rugged hills, must lay siege to forts and castles raised on steep rocks and mountains, and fortified both by nature and by art:  so an orator will be pleased with an opportunity to make great excursions, and when he engages on champion ground, he will display all his forces so as to make an exceedingly fine appearance; but if under the necessity of unraveling the intricacies of some points of law, or placing truth in a clear light from amidst the obscurity thrown around it, he will not then ostentatiously ride about, nor will he use a shower of pointed sentences, as missive weapons; but he will carry on his operations by frustrating his enemy; by mines, by ambuscade, and by stratagem:  all of which are not much to be commended while they are being used, but after they have been practised.  Whence those men benefit themselves most, who seem least desirous of praise; for when the frivolous parade of eloquence has ceased its bursts of thunder among its own applauders, the more potent applause of true talents will appear in genuine splendor; the judges will not conceal the impressions which have been made on them; the sense of the learned will outweigh the opinion of ignorance:  so true it is that it is the winding up of the discourse, and the success attending it, that must prove its true merit.

AVOIDING OSTENTATION

It was customary with the ancients to hide their eloquence; and M. Antonius advises orators so to do, in order that they may be the more believed, and that their stratagems may be less suspected.  But the eloquence of those times could well be concealed, not yet having made an accession of so many luminaries as to break out through every intervening obstacle to the transmission of their light.  But indeed all art and design should be kept concealed, as most things when once, discovered lose their value.  In what I have hitherto spoken of, eloquence loves nothing else so much as privacy.  A choice of words, weight of thought, elegance of figures, either do not exist, or they appear.  But because they appear, they are not therefore to be displayed with ostentation.  Or if one of the two is to be chosen, let the cause rather than the advocate be praised; still the issue will justify him, by his having pleaded excellently a very good cause.  It is certain that no one else pleads so ill as he who endeavors to please, while his cause displeases; because the things by which he pleases must necessarily be foreign to his subject.

The orator ought not to be so particular and vain as not to undertake the pleading of the smaller kind of causes, as beneath him, or as if a matter of less consequence should in any respect lessen the reputation he has acquired.  Duty indeed is a just motive for his undertaking them, and he should wish that his friends were never engaged in any other kind of suits, which in the main are set off with sufficient eloquence when he has spoken to the purpose.