People do not feel towards strangers as they do towards their own countrymen, and the same thing is true of their feeling for language. In prose passages they are far less often fitting because the subject-matter is less exalted. We can now see that a writer must disguise his art and give the impression of speaking naturally and not artificially. We can hide our purpose successfully by taking the single words of our composition from the speech of ordinary life. This is done in poetry by Euripides, who was the first to show the way to his successors.
Language is composed of nouns and verbs.
Nouns are of the various kinds considered in the treatise on Poetry. In the language of prose, besides the regular and proper terms for things, metaphorical terms only can be used with advantage. We can now see that a good writer can produce a style that is distinguished without being obtrusive, and is at the same time clear, thus satisfying our definition of good oratorical prose. Words of ambiguous meaning are chiefly useful to enable the sophist to mislead his hearers. Prose-writers must, however, pay specially careful attention to metaphor, because their other resources are scantier than those of poets.