It is worth not omitting at this point one of our observations, dearest friend. It will be quite brief: that figures by their nature both ally themselves with sublimity and again are wonderfully reinforced by it. Where and how, I will explain. To work cleverly through figures has its peculiar suspect side, and casts the suggestion of ambush, intrigue, fallacy, especially when the speech is before a sovereign judge, and most of all before tyrants, kings, and rulers in their pre-eminence. For such a one is offended at once if, like a foolish child, he be sophisticated by the artifice of an orator's tricks; and taking the fallacy as a contempt of himself, he sometimes turns altogether savage; or even if he masters his anger, he becomes wholly fortified against the persuasiveness of the speech. So a figure seems best when this very thing escapes notice — that it is a figure. §1
Now sublimity and pathos act as a guard against and a wonderful reinforcement of the suspicion that one is figuring; once taken up alongside the figure, the artifice of the trick has slipped beneath the beauties and grandeurs and escaped all suspicion. A sufficient witness is the passage already cited, ‘by those at Marathon.’ How did the orator there hide the figure? Plainly by the very light. Just as fainter lights are blotted out by the sun's circumambient blaze, so the sophisms of rhetoric are dimmed by the magnitude that is poured around them on every side. §2
Something not very different perhaps takes place in painting also: when colours of light and of shadow are placed parallel on the same plane, the light still rushes to meet the eye and not only stands out but appears even nearer by far. So in writing the passions and the sublimities, lying nearer to our souls by some natural kinship and through their splendour, always come into view ahead of the figures, overshadowing their art and keeping it as it were under a veil. §3