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Unfortunately, I liked the latter place very much; the colleges, there are still bigger and still older, they have beautiful quiet parks, galleries of equally famous ancestors, banquet-halls, memorials and dignified janitors, but all this display and tradition is not aimless; it would seem that the purpose of it is to train not learned specialists, but gentlemen. The tempers of some golfers have their humorous side, but there are also some that are painful to witness. The bad-tempered golfer is a nuisance and anxiety to himself and his friends; indeed I have seen it come to such a pass that, though a man may have friends anywhere else, they are not to be found on the links. To prove how much nerve is the first, second, and third necessity in putting, you may take a man of thirty years old who has been and perhaps still is a good cricketer, and has a good eye for games generally. We cannot claim direct experience of predictions or of general laws, but knowledge of them must still be classified as matters of fact, since both they and their negations remain conceivable. Hume shows that experience does not tell us much. A golfer by practice may improve his play with a club, but he very likely will find that, during the time he has occupied himself with this club, another has mysteriously failed him; and in any case the terrible ordeal of putting has to be gone through, and it is the painful experience of bad putters that practice does by no means perfect, but only causes new terrors to appear.

A great player-I may say a very great player-once told me that he had been unable to drive off the tee to his satisfaction for no less a period than four years-this player must have been more than human if to a greater or less degree he was not during all that time in an important match troubled with nerves when he took his stand on the tee. It has been said, that every match is won by the short game; this, like many much-quoted sayings, is a half-truth. At golf, however, it may be truly said that no one putting-green is exactly like any other-one is fast, another slow, one smooth, another uneven, one with one sort of turf, another with another. However, what many people may not realize is that they actually have different meanings-and some striking differences in table features! I contend, however, that it is not, because of the varying conditions of the greens and turf.

In billiards you play for a whole evening or for a whole match on the same table; that is a very small object as compared with a putting-green, and if you have any pretensions to play at all, you ought to gauge the pace of a billiard-table after an hour's play. In the same way you may go round a hazard instead of trying to get over it. You play with the same cue at billiards, with the same bat at cricket, with the same mallet at croquet, with the same racquet at tennis, lawn-tennis, and racquets; golf is the only game in the world, as far as I know, where it is absolutely necessary to have a minimum number of five or six clubs to play a game with. Tennis, for instance, when you first fail to win a short chase, or your opponent keeps on serving nicks; billiards, when your ball is always under a cushion, or the balls dead safe time after time; cricket, when an umpire has given you out by a mistake of judgment-all these are trials, and they form part of the discipline of life. And I have seen lawns where only the masters and not the undergraduates may walk, and staircases where only the graduates and not the students may play billiards; I have seen professors in rabbits’ fur and cloaks as red as lobsters, I have seen the graduates kneel and kiss the hand of the Vice-Chancellor; of all these wonders I have been able to make a drawing only of one venerable college provost, who poured out for me a glass of sherry at least as old as the elder Pitt.

It is not proposed to make this a treatise on the game: if it were I should begin with the truism that it is wise for a golfer to keep his temper. One great value of games is that they are the finest discipline for the temper. But though golf may be more trying to the temper than any other game, every game has its trials. Still, I think, on the whole, increasing age does carry some compensation for golfers; and I believe that when a man has played some years, and his handicap, may be, is brought from scratch to three, it is often found that his short game, especially his putting, is rather improved than otherwise. For some reason which it is impossible to explain, golfers always seem to be far more frightened at being two yards beyond the hole than they are at being two yards short. But in this case the putting of both these distinguished players was never "up"; they failed where nearly every player who is "off" his putting fails; they were short.

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