the Journalists--Contemporary Impressions of Bryant and Bennett--Hone
and the Men of Letters--The Ways of British Lions.


There is one kind of immortality that is not so much a matter of amount
and quality of achievement as of the particular period of achievement.
That, for example, of Samuel Pepys.

Pepys, living in the turbulent, densely populated London of our time,
and recording day by day the events coming under his observation, would
probably have his audience of posterity limited to a little circle of
venerating descendants who would certainly bore the neighbours. It is
quite easy to picture the members of that circle in the year 1998, or
2024. "Listen to what Grandpapa's Diary says of the awful Zeppelin raids
of February, 1917," or, "But Great-grandpapa, who had just finished his
walk in the Park, and was passing Downing Street when the news came,
etc." "Il est fatiguant," whispered Mr. St. John of General Webb at one
of the dinners in "Henry Esmond," "avec sa trompette de Wynandael."
That persistent blowing of the "trompette" of grandpapa would likewise
be voted "fatiguant." "Grandpapa! A plague upon their grandpapa!"

It needed the smaller town, the more limited age, the greater intimacy
of life, to make Pepys's Diary the vivid human narrative that it has
been for so many years.

And as with the Pepys of seventeenth century London, so with the
chronicler of events day by day in the New York of the first half of the
nineteenth century. If there was a Knickerbocker Pepys it was Philip
Hone, who in the span of his life saw his city expand from twenty-five
thousand to half a million, and whose diary has been described as one of