The rule that the course moulds the player has been well exemplified in Sherlock. Hinksey made him a splendid short-game player, but not, by professional standards, a great player of wooden clubs. When he left Oxford for Stoke Poges, his driving lengthened out remarkably. Though somewhere in the neighbourhood of thirty-five, he moved several distinct rungs up the ladder, and in 1910, when he won the News of the World Tournament, he was perhaps the most successful professional of the year. Now having been an inland golfer all his life he has, in his comparative old age, gone to a seaside course at Hunstanton. It will be curious to see if this still further rejuvenates him.

There still remains a large number of amateurs metaphorically clamouring for description. Some of them, more is the pity, we do not now see playing. There is Mr. Charles Hutchings, for instance, who began golf when he was about thirty, won the Championship when he was fifty-three and a grandfather into the bargain, and was never so much to be feared as when seen disconsolately practising and painfully rubbing a rheumatic elbow between his shots. There is Mr. John Low too, who now resolutely looks on at golf, so that we can never again see in quite its perfection the grand manner of wielding the wooden putter. But Mr. Low has always been so thoroughly a golfing philosopher that, even when his game was at its very best, I believe he got more interest and pleasure out of watching than playing. Mr. Low began his golfing career by a remarkable feat of personal magnetism. He made crowds of his friends play golf on Coldham Common at Cambridge, possibly the most repellent spot where the game ever was played. He has done many things for the game since, and amongst others written delightfully about it. Any one who has ever played for the Oxford and Cambridge Golfing Society owes a big debt of pleasure to him and to Mr. Arthur Croome. A broad-minded conservative, the best kind of traditional Scottish golfer, the best of all after-dinner golfing speech-makers, Mr. Low has made a great and characteristic mark on the golf and golfers of his time.

In any vision of amateur golfers no figure comes more readily to mind than that of Mr. Edward Blackwell, throwing his whole body and soul into the blow, his feet clawing and tearing at the ground, a fearsome and yet, by reason of the rounded perfection of his swing, a graceful spectacle. Mr. Black-well does not now hit quite so far as he used to, but he still hits as hard and with the same joy of slogging, so that we can get our full money's worth of fun in looking on. As in the case of Mr. Mure Fergusson, the fact that Mr. Blackwell has never won the Championship seems to leave a gap in the list. When he was quite young he made the mistake of working in California when he should have been golfing at home : and when he did come back he wasted some years in being rather a poor putter with a cleek, until he made the discovery that he could putt with an aluminium club. It was after he lost in the final to Mr. Travis that he took to aluminium, and he has been a good putter ever since. Mr. Blackwell seems to me the perfect type of the natural golfer. Gifted by nature with a beautiful swing, he has enjoyed the game and, unless I do him injustice, bothered his head very little about it. I remember once to have asked him whether, in the hypothetical case of his being off his drive, he would consider the question of practising. He answered No, since if he was off to-day he would probably be all right to-morrow. It is the confession of a simple faith, entirely justified in his case and one which would very likely make many of us happier if not better golfers. Sometimes he hardly seems to realise his own powers. For those who know Woking, it is recorded that Mr. Blackwell, on being told by a caddie to take his brassy for his second to the sixth hole, carried not only the green, but the railings beyond the green, and the trees beyond the railings, and half-way up the railway embankment into the bargain. Perhaps it is a tendency to this occasional and surprising form of error that has prevented him from winning quite all he might have done, but he has won a great deal and diffused a vast deal of enjoyment in doing so.

There could hardly be two players more vividly contrasted than Mr. Blackwell and Mr. Lassen, who was Amateur Champion in 1908 and runner-up in 1911. There is nothing happy-go-lucky or slapdash about Mr. Lassen : very little joie de vivre in his play : nor has he the style of a natural boy golfer. He has a genius for taking pains, a chessplayer's powers of concentration, and an exceptionally keen clear brain in which he has thought out the way of playing golf that suits him. When he was playing one of his matches at Sandwich in 1908-I fancy it was against Major Cecil Hutchison -it was a bright sunshiny day. Mr. Lassen was putting with a club that had a bulging back and so a thick upper edge. He addressed himself to a putt and then found that the sun was glinting on the edge of his putter. He walked to an adjacent bunker, put some sand on the upper edge of his putter, came back and holed the putt. A golfer who can do that has very rare and valuable qualities, and it is only one example of Mr. Lassen's power of leaving nothing to chance when he feels himself in form. When he does not feel in form he relaxes his attention to some extent, but he is always a hard fighter, a foeman who neither gives nor asks for quarter.

Mr. Jenkins, the Amateur Champion of 1914, is another dour and pugnacious player, but he goes into battle not so sombrely as Mr. Lassen, but rather in the manner of Alan Breck, rejoicing in the fact that he is a 'bonny fighter.' As a human being he is always good fun to watch with his quick, abrupt, determined movements and his unruffled confidence. From a technical point of view I should always choose his iron play to look at, for it is as clean and crisp as the shutting of a knife and full of variety of stroke. Few people, moreover, are more likely to hole a putt when it is badly needed, and whether he holes it or not, however unpromising the situation, he will always take trouble and always give himself and the ball a chance.