the success of any of his cases to rest on any petty arts or
undue evasions. Conscious of possessing eminent abilities and
sufficient learning he undertook to advocate no cause that he did
not truly and fully believe in. His ardent pleading and the
fairness of his dealing before the courts was the result of his
firm belief in the justice of his cause. Nothing but truth could
give him this firmness; but plain truth and clear evidence can be
beat down by no ability in handling the quirks and substitutes of
the law.

It was from this source as from no other that Otis drew his power
as a pleader. He was as John Adams records concerning his speech
on the "Writs of Assistance," "a flame of fire," but he was a
flame of fire set burning to consume the dross of injustice and
to purify and rescue the gold of liberty and fair-dealing.
Thomas Hutchinson, before whom Otis often pleaded and whose
testimony is of the greatest weight when we remember that Otis
was his political opponent, has said that he never knew fairer or
more noble conduct in a pleader than in Otis; that he always
disdained to take advantage of any clerical error or similar
inadvertence, but passed over minor points, and defended his
causes solely on their broad and substantial foundations. In
this regard Otis seems to satisfy Emerson's definition of a great
man, when in his essay on the "Uses of Great Men" the latter
declares: "I count him a great man who inhabits a higher sphere
of thought, into which other men rise with labor and difficulty;
he has but to open his eyes to see things in a true light, and in
large relations; whilst they must make painful corrections, and
keep a vigilant eye on many sources of error."