1841 he became its president.  Governor of the New York Hospital, trustee of the Bloomingdale Asylum, founder of the Clinton Hall Association, and of the Mercantile Library, trustee of Columbia College, of the New York Life Insurance and Trust Company, president of the American Exchange Bank, and of the Glenham Manufacturing Company, vice-president of the Institution for the Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb, of the American Seamen’s Fund Society, of the New York Historical Society, of the Fuel Saving Society, a director in the Matteawan Cotton and Machine Company, the Delaware and Hudson Canal Company, the Eagle Fire Insurance Company, the National Insurance Company, a member of the Chamber of Commerce, a manager of the Literary and Philosophical Society, of the Mechanic and Scientific Association, a founder and a governor of the Union Club, and a vestryman of Trinity Church—­the wonder is that he found time to write in his Diary at all.  According to Bayard Tuckerman, who edited the Diary and wrote the Introduction to it, an ordinary day’s work for Hone was “to ride out on horseback to the Bloomingdale Asylum, to return and pass the afternoon at the Bank for Savings, thence to attend a meeting of the Trinity Vestry, or to preside over the Mercantile Library Association.”  “He was never,” said Mr. Tuckerman, “voluntarily absent from a meeting where the interest of others demanded his presence, and many were the good dinners he lost in consequence.”  Again:  “He had personal gifts which extended the influence due to his character.  Tall and spare, his bearing was distinguished, his face handsome and refined; his manners were courtly, of what is known as the ‘old school’; his tact was great—­he had a faculty for saying the right thing.  In his own house his hospitality was enhanced by a graceful urbanity and a ready wit.”

The story of Philip Hone’s life is substantially the story of the town from 1780 till 1851.  When he first saw the light in Dutch Street, there were but twenty thousand persons for the occupying British troopers to keep in order.  When, after his return from Europe in the early ’20s he bought on Broadway in the neighbourhood of City Hall Park, that was the centre of fashionable residence.

But by 1837 trade was claiming the section, and Hone sold out and built himself a new home, this time at the corner of Broadway and Great Jones Street.  He saw the residence portion of the city go beyond that point, saw it grope up Fifth Avenue as far as Twentieth Street.  The first entry in the Diary bears the date of May 18, 1828; the last of April 30, 1851, just four days before his death.  That last entry shows that he felt that the end was near at hand.  “Has the time come?” he asks, and then quotes seven stanzas from James Montgomery’s “What is Prayer?”, adding four stanzas of his own.