"Good Old Days"

[Baker, John]

        From a review of An Empire of Wealth, by John Steele Gordon, in the Wall Street Journal today:

        <<In 1844, 63-year-old Philip Hone wrote:  "Railroads, steamers, packets, race against time and beat it hollow . . . Oh, for the good old days of heavy post coaches and speed at the rate of six miles an hour!"  According to Mr. Gordon, Hone's lament is the first recorded reference to those mythical and ever-advancing "good old days.">>

        I'll start the bidding.  From Bulwer-Lytton's The Last Days of Pompeii (1834):

        <<'When is our next wild-beast fight?' said Clodius to Pansa.

        'It stands fixed for the ninth ide of August,' answered Pansa: 'on the day
after the Vulcanalia--we have a most lovely young lion for the occasion.'

        'Whom shall we get for him to eat?' asked Clodius.  'Alas! there is a great
scarcity of criminals.  You must positively find some innocent or other to
condemn to the lion, Pansa!'

        'Indeed I have thought very seriously about it of late,' replied the aedile,
gravely.  'It was a most infamous law that which forbade us to send our own
slaves to the wild beasts.  Not to let us do what we like with our own,
that's what I call an infringement on property itself.'

        'Not so in the good old days of the Republic,' sighed Sallust.>>

        But I'm sure we can do better than 1834.

John Baker