For younger rising men we look almost in vain. Bret Harte gives no promise of lasting fecundity. Howells does charming work, and will probably long remain in position as a dainty but not suggestive or formative writer. Aldrich is very slight. John Hay easily won whatever name he has, and it will easily pass away. Henry James the younger is one of the rising men, the youth of literature. But of all these there is not one who has yet discovered the stuff out of which the kings and princes, or even the barons, of literature are made. Harte, having written his most famous short stories, had come East. Howells, then thirty-eight, had published three or four novels, but “The Rise of Silas Lapham” was ten years ahead. John Hay, then on the _Tribune_ editorial staff, had written his “Pike County Ballads” and “Castilian Days.” Henry James had put forth only “Watch and Ward.” To these budding geniuses the general public was rather inclined to prefer Augusta Evans’s “St. Elmo,” E. P. Roe’s “Barriers Burned Away,” and Edward Eggleston’s “Hoosier Schoolmaster.” Notwithstanding the expressed doubt as to Harte’s fecundity, Dana admired his work and printed his stories in the _Sun_ for years afterward. Late in the seventies he bought Harte’s output and syndicated it--probably the first successful application of the newspaper syndicate system to fiction. About the same period Robert Louis Stevenson’s earlier successes, such as “The Treasure of Franchard” and “The Sire de Maletroit’s Door,” were having their first American printing in the _Sun_, their original appearance having been in _Temple Bar_ and other English magazines. The files of the _Sun_ for 1891 contain writings of Stevenson that are omitted from most, if not from all of the collections of his works. These are parts of his articles on the South Seas, an ambitious series which he was unable to finish. Some of them were printed in the London _Black and White_. All of them appeared in the _Sun_. Through the _Sun’s_ literary syndicate the American public gained some of its earliest acquaintance with Harte and Henry James. Kipling’s “Light That Failed” had its first American appearance in the _Sun_ in the autumn of 1890. It may interest Mr. James’s admirers to know that one of the Middle Western newspapers, having bought a James novel from the _Sun_, played it up with a gingery head-line: GEORGINA’S REASONS! HENRY JAMES’S LATEST STORY! A Woman Who Commits Bigamy and Enforces Silence on Her Husband! Two Other Lives Made Miserable by Her Heartless Action!