Richard Harding Davis was born in Philadelphia in 1864. His father was a famous editor, and he was raised among cultured people, with every advantage of prestige and social position. He was handsome, full of energy, and all his life made hosts of friends. After getting through college, he took a job with Arthur Brisbane on the New York “Evening Sun,” where his brother tells us he underwent “considerable privation,” his salary being only thirty dollars a week at the start, plus his earnings from short stories. During this same period the present writer was living in New York upon four and one-half a week, and never sure of having that; so you see that standards of “considerable privation” vary considerably. Davis’s first stories dealt with a hero named Van Bibber, a scion of the Fifth Avenue plutocracy, handsome, debonair, wearing his clothes with irreproachable taste, and devoting his abundant leisure to the reforming of New York; Haroun-al-Raschid brought down to date, Sir Galahad in a dress-suit. Happy, care-free, he wanders, with innocent heart and open purse, making things right wherever he finds them wrong. He has the entrée behind the scenes of theatres, but not to seduce the chorus girls--ah, nothing like that, but to rescue a sweet, innocent child and carry her home to a cold, proud, cruel Fifth Avenue father who has refused to acknowledge his wild oat. That done, Van Bibber roams again, and jumps on the neck of a burglar, and kicks his pistol out of his hand, and then gets sorry for him, and buys him a ticket to Montana, where his wife and daughter wait for him to come and reform. Then he wanders to the Bowery, and sees a rowdy insulting a lady; it is not enough for him to demonstrate the natural superiority of the plutocracy by putting this one rowdy to flight, he must crown the demonstration by accepting a challenge from three of “the purest specimens of the tough of the East Side waterfront,” and routing them in the presence of the proud aristocratic beauty. The charm of the story lies in the truly elegant insouciance with which young Van Bibber does all these things--the manner of a juggler keeping six billiard-balls in the air. Here, you see, is the perfect type of the ruling-class glorifier: Homer and the Arabian Nights, Don Quixote and King Arthur, Dumas, Ouida, Rudyard Kipling and Mrs. Humphry Ward all rolled into one. No wonder our grandfathers were captivated, or that the innocent souls who edited “Harper’s” and “Scribner’s” extended the freedom of their columns to this inspired creator of plutocratic romance! It is interesting to note that our “Dick” came from the most English place in the United States, and looked like an Englishman and, perhaps as a matter of instinct, dressed and talked like an Englishman. In his early writing days he lived for a few months at Oxford, and the students of Balliol College took him in on equal footing, an honor never before accorded to a non-student American.