But it is Shakespeare who teaches us best to be good golfers, and the secret of the perfect application of his sentiment and philosophy to the golfer's life is that his writings are so intensely human, and that of all the diversions of man there is none that so much stirs in him the simple instincts, reduces him to the simplest human elements. A round of golf will sometimes bare faults and qualities in a man that have been hidden from the time of their formation in his early years. It is to the man who constantly undergoes this fierce analysis that Shakespeare will most appeal. Let the golfer test his text and see the perfection of the result. The quotation selected for the first day of the year for a Shakespearean calendar that was hung up in a golfer's den was-

"Like a bold champion, I assume the lists, Nor ask advice of any other thought But faithfulness, and courage."

Could golfer take a better motto ?

IX

No class of man looks forward to the spring with keener anticipation than the golfer. Overburdened with his winter's discontent, he fancies it as a time of sunshine, of dry courses, of sprouting young grass that holds up the ball on the suburban links and gives us the first good brassey lies that we have had for some months, of the frequent retirement of the energetic worm, of the quickening of the greens, of the leafing of the trees and the hedgerows, and the brightening of the face of Nature. The golfer is generally a strongly human man, who is not careless of natural beauties as are too many in these increasingly prosaic and strenuous days. Perhaps he likes the coming of the springtime best of all, because he is then enabled to play his game in the best degree of comfort. He is less hampered with heavy clothing, and his hands and wrists keep warm without any cumbersome artificial assistance. And then also he is persuaded, and he is evidently right, that the balls fly very much better in the spring sunshine than they ever did through the heavy and often murky atmosphere of the winter days. Even the golf ball welcomes the coming of spring, and given that it is properly struck it gets a better and longer flight through the air when it is dry and light, and it runs better on the dry turf when it comes down, so that the player finds himself being given encouragement that helps him wonderfully on to his game. And so the man who usually goes by the name of the Average Golfer believes all through every autumn and winter that he comes on to his game best of all in the spring, and that that is the only time of the year when he really does play his best, his real game. The only time when he does not believe that he plays his best game in the spring is in the spring.

The fact is that the conditions of springtime are rather made up of a set of contradictions of a very aggravating character, and they often play the devil with the game of this Average Golfer, the system of which is not too firmly consolidated. This person, one takes it, is a man of medium young to middle age, a great enthusiast, of good means, one more or less constantly engaged in business, having a fair number of social obligations to attend to in evenings, and a golfing handicap of somewhere between six and twelve. This man is possibly afflicted with a troublesome liver, and this organ has a peculiar and most aggravating way of asserting itself in the springtime as it has at no other season. Then it is up to all kinds of tricks, the entire physical system of the man is disarranged and thrown out of gear, and the result is that when all Nature is smiling and the larks are piping as though their little throats would burst with the fulness of their melody, the erstwhile hopeful golfer is in a wretched state of mind, trying new stances for his drive, new ways of gripping, a swing much longer or much shorter than usual, and manoeuvring with his strokes in all other kinds of ways, in the vain hope that he might be permitted to drive at least as well as he did in January, instead of foundering one ball in three and lifting up one of the others high towards the heavens. But there is compensation in the increased hopefulness of spring. The game may be poor, weaker than it was hoped to be. But it will mend; it will surely mend.