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 a 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.