Mr. Michael Scott is not only a very good golfer but a very interesting one, because having been ' teethed on a club 'he practically remodelled his whole game after coming to years of golfing discretion. Before he went to Australia he slashed at the ball, as I have been told by those who then knew his game, with the most complete abandon and a swing as full and free as that of his brother Osmund-than which, by the way, there is no more glorious example of a really full swing to be seen. He came back having won Open and Amateur Championships, and with an entirely new style, standing close to his ball with rather upright clubs and hitting the ball with a short and severely controlled swing. Of all present-day amateurs he is the one who seems most successfully to have solved the problem of doing the same thing over and over again in the same way, whatever the club. There is not much variety, maybe, but a great charm nevertheless in the tremendous 'nip 'he gets into all his shots apparently with the forearm, and it is seen at its best against a wind. With this controlled style he developed a control over his whole manner of playing the game; as he walks silently, almost stealthily after his ball, he seems as if he were playing in a trance. He can go on playing one straight shot after another for a heart-breaking length of time, and it is this blamelessness that is the strongest part of his game. It has only one disadvantage, that if he does unaccountably make a bad shot, it is so surprising an event as sometimes to throw him out of his stride. It was, I think, one mysteriously fluffed mashie shot in the semi-final at Muirfield last year that lost him his match against Mr. Gardner. It was so incredible, and yet it was, as Mr. Mantalini would say, 'a dem'd horrid fact.' Perhaps it lost him an Amateur Championship as well. He is certainly a good enough golfer to win one.

Major C. K. Hutchison at his best had this quality of blamelessness in a high degree. With an admirably sound style, that looked and looks now as if it could never go wrong, he could go on hitting straight for days together. His errors have always seemed to be made only when quite close to the hole. There are so many more fine golfers that I should like to write about ; two more ex-champions in Major Gordon Barry and Mr. Robb; Mr. Robert Harris, a most seductive player; and Mr. Gordon Lockhart, Major Guy Campbell, Mr. Aylmer, Mr. Sidney Fry, and Mr. H. E. Taylor, and the whole formidable clan of Hambros and Martin Smiths.

But as I have had a good deal to do one way and another with University golf, I should like to end with a few who have been pre-eminently University golfers.

An old friend of mine from Oxford accused me the other day of declining to make any positive statement about golf. Well, I will accept his challenge now and make one. I put Mr. Guy Ellis, who played for Oxford in 1895 and 1896, first among all the undergraduate golfers I ever saw. It is not an opinion that can be supported by facts and figures. Mr. Ellis only played once or twice in a Championship without going very far. He won his two matches against Cambridge by very small margins. But the wholesome dread of a golfer's opponents is always good evidence, and those who knew and feared Mr. Ellis's game at that time and for a few years afterwards, whether they positively agree with me or not, will agree that he was a wonderful golfer. I used to play with him at Eton, when he was good by fits and starts, but rather erratic. After an interval of two years I met him again when he was playing for Oxford, and he was brilliantly steady and steadily brilliant. I never knew any one, amateur or professional, who hit the ball so persistently straight with all clubs, when he wanted to. The trouble was that he did not always want to, but I shall not forget one occasion when he did. Playing for Woking, he had been winning his matches against the Oxford and Cambridge teams by the barest possible margins. Somebody made some small joke about this, and it turned out a very poor joke indeed for the next Oxonian that Mr. Ellis played. The giant was goaded to action, and won by sixteen up in an eighteen-hole match. His was too eccentric a genius for everyday life and golf perhaps, but genius it was.

After he went down Oxford had two more very fine undergraduate golfers in Mr. Humphrey Ellis and the late Mr. Johnny Bramston. Both were just about as good as they could be, and there was much argument as to which was the better. Mr. Ellis is still playing a beautiful game, though he plays it chiefly in the seclusion of Rye. As to Mr. Bramston, if he had not soon, after his first year, developed his fatal illness, I can hardly imagine that anything could have stopped him winning the Championship. In that first year he had a wonderful week at Westward Ho ! in which he beat in succession in team matches, Mr. Hilton, Mr. Hutchinson, Mr. Low, and Mr. Ellis, some of them by an irreverently large number of holes, and not long after he just lost in the semi-final of the Championship to Mr. Robb. He had power and crispness and confidence all in abundant measure. How plainly I can see him now, with his red mop of hair blown about by the wind and that right wrist of his climbing over the left at the end of the shot, as if tugging at the ball to keep it on the straight path. There have been very few golfers of such promise. If not quite so brilliant as these three, Mr. Hooman was very good as an undergraduate, and so was Mr. J. L. Humphreys, who went away to foreign climes and so is little known.

Cambridge has not produced any golfers who were so good as these three at a similarly early age. We do not seem to deal in infant phenomenons. True, they had Mr. Gordon Barry, who was an amateur champion, but he came up with his honours upon him. He had won them as the undergraduate of another university, St. Andrews. Nor in fact did he ever do himself full justice as a Cambridge golfer-or later as an Oxford one. Leaving him on one side, as a special case, I think Mr. Herman de Zoete was as good a Cambridge undergraduate player as ever played, with great power and a lovely swing. He hardly ever plays now, more is the pity, except sometimes at North Berwick on a summer holiday, when he is, I believe, as good as ever. Mr. R. P. Humphries was very good in 1914, and in that year reached the semi-final of the Amateur Championship. Other Cambridge players have matured more slowly and improved much after their undergraduate days. Mr. John Low is a conspicuous example : so is Mr. Mellin : so is the best golfer, in my judgment, that has yet come out of Cambridge, Mr. H. D. Gillies. Mr. Gillies has a versatile genius for games as well as more serious things. He came up to Cambridge with a notion of getting a cricket blue, never played cricket at all but rowed in the University boat. He came into the golf team by chance, being on a reading party at Sandwich where the match chanced to be played that year, and so being discovered at the last moment. With this remarkable capacity for doing things well and tremendous determination, he made himself a few years after he came down into a wonderfully good golfer. He, like one or two others I have mentioned, has simplified golf. He seems to be playing one shot all the time, and that a most unpleasantly good one. It is to some extent a deceptive appearance. Taylor also appears to be playing one shot all the time, though a very different shot to that of Mr. Gillies, but he cannot really be doing so. When people play the game in this fashion it means that they have got a very correct basis to their game-perhaps it is our friend Mr. Croome's 'fundamental shot' again. At any rate they have the essential thing and cut down non-essentials to a minimum. And they are usually extremely steady. Mr. Gillies, at his best, is magnificently, detestably steady, and very powerful as well. Very few modern amateurs have clung so close to the professionals as he did in the two French Open Championships just before the war. Surgery being more important than golf, he has not the time for golf nowadays, but he has great shots in him.