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 the most fascinating personal documents ever penned.

There is a little thoroughfare far downtown called Dutch Street.  It runs from Fulton to John Street.  There Philip Hone was born on the 25th of October, 1780, and there he passed his boyhood in a wooden house at the corner of John and Dutch Streets which his father bought in 1784.  After a common school education, he became, at seventeen years of age, a clerk for an older brother whose business as an auctioneer consisted mainly in selling the cargoes brought to New York by American merchantmen.  Two years as a clerk, and then Philip was made a partner.  The firm prospered, and by 1820, the future diarist, though only forty years old, had become a rich man.  With the best years of his mature life before him, with a wish to see the world and a desire for self-improvement, he retired from business, and in 1821, made his first journey to Europe, sailing from New York on the “James Monroe.”  When he returned, he bought a house on Broadway, near Park Place, on the exact spot now occupied by the Woolworth Building, for which he paid twenty-five thousand dollars.  There is extant an old print of the house, showing also the American Hotel on the corner, and another residence, the ground floor of which was occupied by Peabody’s Book Shop.  On the block below, where the Astor House was built later, were the homes of John G. Coster, David Lydig, and J.J.  Astor.  It was one of the most magnificent dwellings of the town, and there Hone entertained not only the distinguished men of New York, but also such Americans of country-wide fame as Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and Harrison Gray Otis; and such old-world visitors as Charles Dickens, Lord Morpeth, Captain Marryat, John Galt, and Fanny Kemble.  He had children growing up—­his marriage to Catherine Dunscomb had taken place in 1801, when he was in his twenty-second year—­and for the benefit of the young people his was practically open house.  Public and private honours were thrust upon him.  An assistant alderman from 1824 to 1826, in the latter year he was appointed Mayor. (The Mayor was not elected until 1834.) William Paulding had preceded him in the office, and William Paulding succeeded him in 1827.  But the Hone administration was long remembered on account of its civic excellence and its social dignity.  For more than thirty years he served gratuitously the city’s first Bank of Savings, which was established in 1816, and in