There are two rather different systems on which instruction may be imparted in the art of driving. In one the victim is first of all carefully placed in position by means of a foot-rule, while an exhaustive explanation is given him of the probably fatal effects of adopting any of some six other courses. Then, when his mental and bodily faculties have become paralysed by terror and cramp respectively, he is allowed, as an afterthought, to swing his club. In the other, as little attention as possible is for the moment paid to position, but the teacher's first object is that his pupil should learn to swing the club backwards and forwards in a reasonably correct, and at the same time comfortable manner, while having as few things as possible on his mind. Then, when he has attained to something dimly resembling a swing, the question of attitude is gone into in greater detail. The latter seems to me the better of the two, and for a specific reason. Very good golfers adopt very

Note. - The pictures illustrating the various strokes, positions, etc., discussed by Mr. Darwin, are from photographs of Fred Robson taken in actual execution of each stroke. - [Ed.] different attitudes before striking the ball: attitudes which have so little in common that to deduce from them any hard-and-fast general law that shall be useful to the learner is almost impossible. There must always be so many exceptions to any rule that the question resolves itself in the end into a matter of opinion. On the other hand, as regards swinging the club, however different from each other the good players may look to our fallible eyes, yet, if their swings be picked to pieces, certain things will be found in the methods of one and all of them. Those things therefore would appear to be essentials, and by all means let us get the things that are essential drummed into the student's head as soon as possible.

Yet at the very outset I must depart from the plan that I have proposed for myself not once but twice, in order to deal with the question of clubs and the method of holding them. In order to get to the real business, however, I will, at the present moment at any rate, be as brief as possible. As to the club, indeed it is wise at this stage to say just as little as may be. If the reader is not in the absolutely elementary stage, he will already have got a wooden club which he believes, no doubt rightly, to be the best in the world; if he is a beginner, he had better let himself be guided by the man who sells him the club, unless the latter appear obviously dishonest or incompetent. The only two points on which he may venture to insist are that the club should not be too long, and that it should be reasonably lofted in the face.

As to the question of grip, I propose to leave over for the moment the much debated question of the overlapping grip, and to say that a club may be grasped in any way a man pleases subject to these three provisoes:

1. That he holds his hands as near together as may be.

2. That he has the knuckles of his left hand turned perceptibly upward, though not to an extent that will cramp him.

3. That he do not imbed the handle of his club too deeply in the palm of the right hand, nor hold it with that hand in too cast-iron a grip. The left thumb may do what it pleases, but the right thumb will be better round the handle of the club than straight along it.

And now at last for the swing, with only these two further words of caution: that the player should stand as far from his imaginary ball as he comfortably can, that his feet should be fairly wide apart, and that he should begin by making himself and his muscles feel limp and 'floppy,' if the expression be permissible, rather than taut and rigid.

The point of the last piece of advice is just this, that, to quote from the Badminton Library, ' above everything the golfing drive is a swing and not a hit.' It is often said that the best golfers of to-day hit much more pronouncedly than did their predecessors, and that in fact the golfing stroke is really a hit and not a swing. I will not pause to argue the proposition, which may after all merely resolve itself into a question of words; if there is truth in it, it is an improper truth to be jealously guarded from the golfing young person. Whatever the best word to describe it, a golf-ball is best propelled by a smooth and even motion of various parts of the player's anatomy, and if the beginner imagines himself to be hitting, he will inevitably brace himself for an effort, tauten his muscles, and deliver a blow spasmodic, jerky, and uneven, probably accompanied by a palpable jump. So, whatever he thinks, he must clothe himself in a panoply of faith, 'the quality which consists in believing that which we know to be untrue,' and believe with his whole soul that he is to sweep away the ball, or rather, for the present, the head of a daisy.

So armed, he may take an easy gentle swing or two; then at the third swing let him stop in the middle - at the top of the swing, as it is called - and in the words of the Irish drill-sergeant ' step out here and look at himself.' Two tests may be suggested as to whether he is performing the action, roughly speaking, rightly or wrongly. Let him observe, firstly, whether the nose of his club is pointing straight down to the ground; and, secondly, whether his left wrist is bent inward so as to be almost directly under the shaft of his club. The latter point needs perhaps a further word of explanation. The learner has probably noticed at one time or another that common, and often charming phenomenon, the bad, female lawn-tennis player; he will have seen her method of playing a back-hand shot with the wrist bent outward in the direction in which the ball is supposed by courtesy to be about to travel. The golfer's wrist at the top of his swing should be just as unlike that lady's wrist as it is possible for one thing to be unlike another.