1934 100 Famous Cocktails ( second printing ) by Oscar of the Waldorf

WINES AND LIQUORS

mankind ascended from savagery and developed civilized refinements the right use of wines and other alcoholic beverages became an art, and an encouragement to all the arts. No nation, pastor present,ever produced great music or sculpture, painting or literature, on an unrelieved diet of plain water! The great peoples of the earth—notwithstand ing certain "reforming" elements to whom these spir itual values mean little—^have taken the products of a beneficent soil, fermented or distilled them, and quenched their thirst with cheerful thanks to tlie gods for such blessings. Consequently the art of right drinking is to a degree, the story of the human race. The ancient Hebrews, migrating into the Holy Land, dreamed of the day when every man should contentedly drink of his own vine beneath his own fig tree, in those times the cri terion of prosperity. The Greeks of the classic Golden Age,leaving to posterity their priceless legacies of the Iliad and the Parthenon,of Socrates,Aristophanes and Pythagoras, cultivated the grape even on the slopes of high Olympus, at whose summit Bacchus and his fellow deities quaffed goblets of nectar at fair Hebe's hands.

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