Any one who has watched much golf has only to shut his eyes in order to see pass before him in a long procession the great players of his time. He sees their characteristic clothes, the very angles of their pipes, their attitudes as they hit the ball or gaze after it in its flight, urging it this way or that with unconscious movements of the club, or stand waiting for the enemy's shot. They flow on and on in a long stream, and he watches them with a pleasant, dreamy feeling, with now and then a sudden thrill, and sometimes a pang of regret that he can hardly hope to see some of them again inside the rope with the tramp, tramp of a big crowd behind them. First of all in my own particular procession is the figure of Willie Fernie, the open champion of 1883, who was the professional at Felixstowe when I began to play there as a very little boy. He stands at the door of his shop, close to the first green and opposite the Martello tower, in a white apron and a curious yachting cap with a shiny peak, and brandishes a half-finished wooden club in his strong wrists. That picture flits away, as it might on a cinematograph, and there follows another of Fernie switching the ball away with a swing which for graceful ease and dash and flick of the wrist seems to me even now not to have been surpassed. Next to him is Mr. Mure Fergusson, who used to come down to play at Felixstowe occasionally, to be gazed at by me with eyes of unspeakable awe. I have seen him play very often since then, but still retain a quite separate and boyish vision of him hitting what seemed a superhuman tee shot from the first tee. I have, too, a perhaps more characteristic impression of him, standing up solid and determined to a short putt and looking as if nothing in the world could possibly prevent his holing it. Somebody once said that if he had a putt of six feet or so to win a match on the last green and was allowed to get any other golfer to hole it for him, he would without a moment's hesitation appoint Mr. Fergusson. It was a fine compliment and well deserved. No one else used to look quite so supremely confident at that distance at a critical moment, and never was confidence better justified. The ball seemed to have no other course except to dash itself against the back of the tin and then fall limply into the hole.

Every one must have some such early memories which he feels, unjustifiably no doubt, to be his very own and nobody else's. In the procession which is common to any golfing dreamer, we must assume that three golfers in particular will more often lead the way than any others. Needless to say the three are the 'Triumvirate' - Harry Vardon, James Braid, and J. H. Taylor. Everybody has seen them play and knows what they have done. Duncan has analysed the very different ways in which each of the three gets his results. It remains for me to try to give some kind of impression of them as human beings as well as golfers. Harry Vardon always seems to me to play as if he enjoyed the game most: Taylor as if he enjoyed it least : Braid as if he took it as part of the day's work. Yet all those three statements need qualification. Vardon never for a moment allows himself to play carelessly, as an amateur does when he is enjoying the game. He is always careful and determined, but there is an air of serenity about him, born perhaps of his perfect smoothness and grace of style, which belongs to no one else. Mr. Hutchinson once wrote of Vardon's method of play that he bore himself with a 'gay and gallant courage,'and I would not venture to attempt any improvement on the phrase. Nobody could play as he does without having thought a great deal about the game. Yet he gives the impression of having discovered the best and simplest way of doing everything by the light of nature. His hands look just a little more perfectly dovetailed, the one into the other, than do anybody else's, and no one has at once so completely comfortable and yet commanding a stance to the ball. Of all golfers he and Mr. John Ball always look to me as if one had only to turn a key in their insides, as in a mechanical toy, to make them go on swinging the club perfectly easily and truly to the end of time.

I said that Taylor seemed to enjoy the game least of the three. That does not imply that he looks unhappy: rather that he seems always to be going at top speed. The high pressure in his case is palpable. Enjoyment is in any case altogether too inadequate a word to apply to him. A soldier rushing on his enemy with a bayonet and proposing to stick it into him may feel a savage joy, but it cannot be called enjoyment. When things have gone ill with him and he has pulled the battle round and is righting his way home in triumph, Taylor looks transfigured or exalted. No milder word will do. He wears this look most clearly when he is not fighting a human opponent, but rather himself and the wind and the weather. One would expect so terrible a fighter to love match play best, but it is not so. I have even heard Taylor say that he cannot play a match. That is, with all respect to him, absurd, but he plays a scoring round even better than he does a match. Then all his pugnacity-and he has plenty of it-can find a vent not on one wretched opponent but on the universe. He will tell you that he hates a match, because he cannot help feeling moments of good nature in the course of it and is sorry for them afterwards. Perhaps this may be the right explanation, that he finds it easier to be entirely relentless against an entirely abstract foe ; or perhaps his mind is so tremendously concentrated on his own shots that he is a little disturbed and thrown out of his stride by having to consider some one else. This power of intense concentration and a sometimes almost furious resolution not to be beaten are his two great moral assets. They are in him part of a temperament which in any other man would be said to be a very bad one for golf, for it is the temperament of a poet. There was surely never a more emotional golfer, but he has, to a greater extent perhaps than any other player, made these superficially annoying emotions of his into valuable and obedient servants. How often they try to rebel we do not know, but we can make a shrewd guess and feel the greater respect for their master.