golfers" with an intelligent cicerone, and dashes off most of their notorieties in rough but expressive outline. Then we have poems of various periods, pregnant with personal references or allusions, which can only be fully appreciated by habitués who have lived behind the scenes. The earliest and perhaps the most vigorous of these is "The Golf, an heroi-comical poem," in mock-heroical measure. The poet was a certain Mr Thomas Mathison, originally a writer in Edinburgh, who afterwards turned clergyman. The most amusing and attractive, inasmuch as it treats of men who are living now or were living lately, is the "Golfiana" of George Fullerton Carnegie, who died in 1843. The verve and swing are better than the verse, and its piquancy comes mainly from more or less kindly personalities, so that we should only doit injustice were we to dismember it in extracts, unless we could spare them ample space. as a specimen of the style and the spirit of affectionate enthusiasm for favourite scenes and associations that animates it, as well as kindred pieces, we may give the "Address to St Andrews," with which it ludes:

ADDRESS TO ST ANDREWS.

But

pre

There is spirit enough in Mr Carnegie's verses; yet we think they are surpassed by a rhyming epistle we received this season from a valued contributor, written on the bosom of "the exulting and abounding Rhine," but inspired by regretful memories of the bonny links of St Andrews. The hiatus we have made in the middle is valde deflendus, we know; but though the bard bursts forth in discriminating raptures over the gifts of many our most famous golfers, we fear they would be Low German to the great body of our readers.

A VOICE FROM THE RHINE.

"ON BOARD THE

of

STEAMER PRINZ VON PREUSSEN, BETWEEN MAYENCE AND COLOGNE, 17th September 1875.

"IN the heart of the Rhineland! afloat on the Rhine!

Ho! Kellner, schnell kommen! gleich bringen sie Wein !

What? Look at the scenery? Let it go hang!

I leave that to Herr Cook and his Cock

Jamie, and Strath,

*

Which twice another round will quietly assuage.

It is indeed a goodly sight to see
These red-coat champions marshalled
for the fray,

Driving the ball o'er bunker, rut, and
lea,

And clearing, with imperious "fore,” the way,

Enlivening still the game with laugh and say,

Whilst trotting club-man follows fast behind,

Prepared with ready hand the "tees" to lay,

With nicest eye the devious ball to find,

And of the going game each player to remind."

As we have been writing to present a volume they will delight in to devotees of the noble game, we have deemed it superfluous to begin at the alphabet of technicalities, or to supply a glossary of terms as we went along. Mr Clark's book must remain sealed in great measure to those benighted southerns whose ignorant profanity confounds the golf with vulgar hocky; although even the profanum vulgus cannot fail to appreciate the cleverness and exquisite humour of the illustrations. The most intelligent strangers are slow to comprehend the profound earnestness and thrilling enthusiasm which the game so evidently excites. Not that that dulness of comprehension lasts a moment longer than the time they are able to stick to their passive role of spectators. Let them take the club in their hand, and light begins to break upon them, and in the more vivid flashes, the more they are sportsmen by nature. The first swings may be failures: the ball may be topped, or the sand it is resting on may suffer. But let them only go on for a couple of holes or so, and already the scales

will be falling from their eyes. The first attachment of that memorable day grows speedily into an absorbing passion, which lays hold of the mature man as it never can seize on the boy; and he finds the invigorating pastime as inevitably seductive as those baleful vices of gaming and drinking. He perseveres in spite of failures and discouragement; and to his dying day he toils towards the distinction which he may long have merited, but can seldom attain. Not even at St Andrews have we found ourselves among more thoroughgoing votaries, than when among the mixed multitude of English, Americans, and Frenchmen, who played for the most part so exceedingly indifferently, on the plain of Billères by the Gave of Pau. Many an Englishman, too, has gone southward in missionary mood that has sought vent in proselytising in his native country. From Devon to Northumberland are links and wastes that have as yet eluded the enterprise of the capitalist. We are glad to know that many a good game goes on among men who as yet may have hidden their lights under bushels. Unquestionably golf is the most catholic of sports. It recommends itself to both sexes alike, and to every age, rank, and calling. We have referred to the prohibitory statutes its popularity provoked, in the most troubled periods of Scottish history, when men held to their lives by the tenure of their swords, and every one's hand was against his neighbour. It is a strange picture we conjure up the baron rid ing down from the neighbouring fortalice on the cliff, with a varlet behind carrying the clubs, and having the pockets of his slashed breeches bulging out with the golfballs. We see the worthy warrior setting his sentinels, if he were prudent, against surprise, and strip

ping off his linked hauberk, while his footpage was teeing the ball. We may well imagine that he must have had many other things to think of, and that the niceties of the putting-green might have seemed somewhat tame to a gentleman whose trade was blows, and whose hands were heavily weighted with blood-feuds. But you would be sure to enter more thoroughly into his feelings, if you paid a visit to one of the favourite golfing grounds nowadays. Money-getting, and professional ambitions in their various shapes, are, we suppose, at least as absorbing as blood-shedding; yet they never wean the golfer from his earlier and more innocent loves. He may have climbed to the highest places on the bench; he may be floundering from morning to long past midnight in an ocean of briefs; he may wag his head habitually in a pulpit; and yet so long as he remains a shadow of his former self, he may be seen in most unprofessional costume taking his pleasure gaily in the crowd of kindred spirits. Nay, in this instance only, precedent and distinguished patronage has been too much for deep-seated Scottish prejudices; and it shows the hold golf has established on the national affections, that a rising young advocate may venture to coquette with it, without being put to the horn by austere writers to the signet.

"A tame game" indeed! " and apparently somewhat uninteresting"! The dullest and least impressionable of onlookers will scarcely dare to reiterate that most absurd of calumnies after his friend has taken him a round of the links. Stubborn facts convert and silence him. Among the motley groups he mixes with, except here and there in the case of some unlucky individual who is out of play, or hopelessly over

weighted, is there a man about him who is not so entirely absorbed, as scarcely to have even a look or a civil word for the stranger? See the finish of some exciting match on the putting green, and mark, except in the rarest instances, the perceptible agitation of the oldest players, that only habit succeeds in controlling. Case-hardened veterans will tell you, from the fulness of their experience, that men who keep their coolness elsewhere, who have learned to bear up against the vicissitudes of their fortunes without a throb of the pulse or a quiver of the eyelid, lose their nerve altogether on occasion on the golf

ground. And is it nothing to have passed muster in a game that insures you exercise and innocent excitement, stimulating the mind as well as the body up to the clesing days of an existence it has brightened and prolonged? that holds men together in congenial friendship whose ties are only drawn tighter at the age when one is most apt to grow unsocial? "Long may golf flourish" is the wish we would wind up with, were it worth the while; but we can trust its future with the most absolute confidence to the constant affections of the Scottish people.