A virtue allied with those just named is what they call amplification: when, as the matter and the rhetorical contests admit, in the periods many starting-points and pauses, fresh greatnesses, one rolling in upon another, are continually brought in step by step. §1
Whether this is achieved through commonplaces, through emphasis, through reinforcement of facts or arguments, through the disposition of actions or passions (for the kinds of amplification are countless), the orator must none the less know that none of these can stand complete by itself without sublimity, except perhaps in pity or in disparagement; in all the other forms of amplification, take away the sublime, and you have taken the soul out of the body. Their force at once goes slack and is emptied unless invigorated together with sublimity. §2
Yet how the present rules differ from what was just said (for that was a circumscribing and assembling of leading topics into a unity), and what is the general distinction between sublimity and amplification, must be set down briefly for clarity's sake. §3