Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III A Knickerbocker Pepys A Knickerbocker Pepys—Tke Span of a Life—A Man of Many Responsibilities—Storm and Stress—Political Protestations—Hone and 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." " II est fatiguant," whispered Mr. St. John of General Webb at one of thedinners 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 b...