Many a work has started out with a tremendous appeal to its first audience, but has not been able to hold its second or third. The first night is not always a sure test of the length of a "run." Such a work had a momentary word to speak which was appropriate, which came as pat as Vice in the old comedy; but like a jest called out by a passing event, it raised its crackle of laughter and died. One need not go far to find examples. Mrs. Radcliffe's _Mysteries of Udolpho_ is pigeonholed here; and _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ and _The Jungle_ are tied by the same tape, in spite of a certain uncanny habit of reappearance of Mrs. Stowe's painful tale. Much literature of this sort is, of course, temporarily valuable; but Time promptly and wisely puts it into the wallet at his back. Without endurance, fame is as the fire of thorns under the pot; without vitality, naught can endure. As a matter of fact a work need not be brutally vital to have a fair chance at long life. It must interest somebody very much indeed. Of course, the great immortals start out in life popular in the best sense; but there are lesser immortals too. One does not have to be Dante or Shakespeare to win out. So long as the second class passengers persist in interesting a few hearers on the various stages of the road, they will not be forgotten. They may be, as they usually are, caviare to the general, but they find from age to age fit audience. Poets like Horace and Spenser and Blake, the authors of _Emma_ or _Cranford_ may cross the final line side by side with their great competitors. And some of us who venture diffident prophecy, expect greater endurance for Mr. Robert Frost and his shy _North of Boston_ than for the dramatic anachronisms of the late Stephen Phillips, or the epic _longueurs_ of Mr. Alfred Noyes. Long life in literature concerns itself with the length of Clotho's thread, and not at all with the question as to whether it be labelled "No. 60" or "No. 90." But to have transcended its own time by a generation or so is no promise of immortality. Every work if not hopelessly tangled in the perishabilities of its own age, is liable to be so tangled in those of its own century or epoch. How often have men watched with exultation the endurance of a work, and jumped to conclusions, when wisdom would have recognized that it could last only while certain ideals or moods prevailed. Was not Byron a god for a generation? But, alas, as the waters of time rose, he found himself caught in the eel-grass of romanticism, and pulled under. And did not the _Romance of the Rose_ hold men bound by its myriad lines for centuries--and where is it now? Dusty upon dusty shelves. Its voice was that of Mediævalism, not of humanity. It perished with the conventions and provincialism of its era.