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times the cock, the sacrificial bird, has been associated with
strong and delectable drinks.
Evidence of poetic praise of the cocktail has been seen
by enthusiastic students in the lines of Horace:
Be joyous, Dellius, I pray,
The bird of morn, with feathers gay,
Gives us his rearwards plume;
For mingled draughts drive care away
And scatter every gloom.
But it is an established fact that Claudius, a physician in
early Roman times, invented a mixture consisting of vini
gallici, lemon juice with a few pinches of dried adders.
This was prepared for his Imperial master Commodus, who
considered it the finest of aperitifs, and judging by his habit
of living unwisely and too well, Commodus should have
known what he was talking about.
Until the eighteenth century there appear to be no
further records, when the word was used both in England
and America. In Yorkshire dialect, cocktail denoted beer
that was fresh and foaming, and dictionaries at the end of
that century give the meaning of the word as appertaining
to horses of mixed breeding or mixed bred.
When narrating the story of Betsy Flanagan, an
American heroine, the widow of a revolutionary soldier
who, in 1779, sold mixed drinks at her tavern, the cocktail
was some special mixture or mixtures, and Fennimore Cooper,
in his book "Spy," awarded her the honour of being the
inventor of the cocktail. Bearing in mind that Fennimore
Cooper wrote what would be known to-day as "best sellers,"
there is every reason to suppose that his readers were
convinced that the cocktail was invented in America.
Although the evidence proves that the idea of making
mixed drinks existed centuries before America was discovered,
it is certain that the cocktail first became popular in America,