Bartlett was one of those great newspaper writers whose fate--or choice--it is never to own a newspaper and never to attract public attention through the writing of signed articles or books. Writing was not primarily his profession, and by the older men of New York who remember him he is recalled as a brilliant lawyer rather than as a writer. He met Dana through Secretary Stanton, and he was the _Sun’s_ attorney soon after Dana and his friends bought the paper. His law-offices were in the Sun Building, directly below Mr. Dana’s own offices. There, and also at the Hoffman House, where he lived when he was not on his estate at Brookhaven, Long Island, Mr. Bartlett wrote his articles for the _Sun_. Bartlett was a writer of the school of simplicity. His style of reducing a proposition to its most elementary form, so that it was clear to even the Class B intellect, was the admiration and envy of all who knew his articles. It was an inspiration, too, to many young newspapermen of his day. The manner of Mr. Arthur Brisbane of the _Evening Journal_, luring the reader into a sociological dissertation by first inquiring whether he knows “Why a Flea Jumps So Far,” is the Bartlett manner, with such modifications as are necessary to reach the attention of a group intellectually somewhat different from Bartlett’s readers. Only Bartlett did not spend too much time on the flea. Of the three men whose articles have most distinguished the first column of the _Sun’s_ editorial page, each has had his own weapon when leading to attack. Dana struck with a sword. Mitchell used--and uses--the rapier. Bartlett swung the mace. It was jewelled with the gems of language, but still it was a mace; and if it crushed the skull of the enemy at the first blow, so much the better. It was Bartlett, for instance, who wrote the article in which the Democratic candidate for President in 1880, General Hancock, was referred to as “a good man, weighing two hundred and forty pounds.” W. O. Bartlett wrote for the _Sun_ from 1868 until his death in 1881. He was the foremost figure in the group of older men around Dana--the men who had been prominent in political and literary life before the Civil War. Other notable men of middle age who were chosen by Mr. Dana to write editorial articles were James S. Pike, Fitz-Henry Warren, Henry B. Stanton, and John Swinton.