Away back in the fifties there came from St. Andrews—from he pen of a learned Professor, it agserted—a quaint little brochure, now very scarce. with the tile "Shakespeare on Golf." - The writer lays down a daring proposition that Shakespeare was a golfer and knew every peculiarity of the St. Andrews Links—that he had experience of all the bunkers, that he was familiar with '"Walkinshaw." and "the Elysian Fidlds," that he sometimes drove into the Burn, that he once did the Long Hole in three, and that his shortest score was $2! "Tt is more than probable that when Shakespeare visited Scotland as_a_ strolling player, and went to Glamis, Dun-inane, and Forres, collecting material for Macbeth, he also spent some time at St. Andrews and had an occasional round of the links!
Our author supports his contention by more than one hundred allusions to the game in the works of our Bard, and who can Jaugh at his theory when he supports it by such a quotation as this on a The tag about catching a Scotsman young is evidently more elastic than Dr. Johnson had in his mind. The case of Jock Hutchison, the Open Golf Champion. who is now on his way back] to the land of his adoption, suggests that a Scotsman may even become an anti-Scot. This phenomena, if credible at all, is much rarer than the occultation of Venus, which took place the other morning after an interval of 20 years.
In the course of an interview before setting sail, Hutchison gave a very frank expression of his views about British golf and golfers. On one point he was especially emphatic. He was asked whether it was an American or as a Scotsman that he won the Open Championship at St. Andrews, and naturally he replied "Tt was an American victory pure and simple." He said he was proud to be an American citizen, but unnecessarily added "When I change my country T do it for the better." Tu the States, he went on, "they o threat you like a human being."" There "a2 man like me can zo out' to dinner with a member of one's club: but over here no member would take you to his house for_dinner."
Hiutchison's expressed pride in his American citizenship is unexceptionable but the above, and other like remarks, were quite uncalled for. Greater and lesser Scotsmen than he have wandered into far corners of the earth, but the flame of national sentiment in them never waned. The love of country is one of the characteristics of the Scot abroad. And Hutchison's aberration may be passed over. The handicap of a good many professional golfers is that they do not talk as well as they play, and their speech is not entitled to anything like the same respect as their strokes. His farewell does not leave a favourable impression, and if it was a matter of policy for a man whose future and fortune are in America, it is one of those things that might have been much better said. Iv certainly does not suggest the pleasant, agreeable personality who in the week he spent in St. Andrews, the town of his birth, achieved the greatest golfing feat in his career, consorted with "id cronies, and generally created a good impression.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.