Henry Marquand

The last half-dozen years of Henry Marquand’s life were spent in active work on the State Board of Charities; in which, as his colleagues have publicly testified, he raised a very high standard of public service. The record showed that in 1916 he traveled no less than two thousand miles in visiting the institutions of his district. Earlier in life he interested himself in yachting and he had his turn at business affairs; but it would not be hard for anyone who knew him to guess that the happiest period of his life was when he entered the world of printer’s ink, first as literary critic and then as chief editorial writier [sic] on the old Commercial Advertiser. That was an episode of which present-day New Yorkers have little recollection; yet there are still on the Century’s roll of membership two or three other survivors of that group of congenial and ambitious young men which dispersed when the newspaper was sold in 1891 to representatives of the penny journalism of the day. The extraordinarily large proportion of them who subsequently made their mark in the profession is sufficient witness to the quality of that odd little journalistic circle of the eighties. Probably every one of the group would have confessed, even in the later years of public repute, that he tasted the pure delights of journalistic adventure then as he never tasted them afterward. It was so with Harry Marquand, who always afterward looked back with particular fondness to the days when those aspiring youths were sharpening their wits in political, literary, and artistic criticism. He never returned to the field of newspaper activities, but he did not relinquish the work of the literary reviewer during all his later avocations.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1922 Century Association Yearbook