his readers along with him, and invest the history of the ancient city with a human interest such as it is in the power of few writers to create in a like degree.

Readers of Dr Smith's important work can scarcely fail to realise how much of archæological research still remains to be accomplished; and at the same time how much can be done by the investigations of trained scholars such as the author, who have contrived for themselves opportunities of first-hand acquaintance with the archæological problems of Jerusalem. So far as Great Britain is concerned, however, the matter is still unfortunately one of private contrivance on the part of individual scholars; and it is surely a subject of reproach to this country that there is at Jerusalem no British school of research like the German and American schools and the Dominican Convent of St Stephen, or the British schools at Rome and Athens.

The present time, when the question of research is so much in the air at both our older Universities, seems to offer a unique opportunity for the supply of this deficiency; but, crippled as Oxford and Cambridge are in the matter of funds, and beset by the demands of other branches of study, it is difficult to see how the project can hope to gain the support which it deserves. A mere fraction of the money which is so lavishly bestowed by wealthy benefactors upon free libraries and scientific laboratories would suffice handsomely to equip such a school; and if, in addition to this, an Oxford and a Cambridge College were each to devote a Research Fellowship to the cause, and other British universities were willing to co-operate, the school would be brought into close connexion with our ancient seats of learning, and a constant succession of students would be secured. Such a scheme, too, might be carried through without in any way diminishing the support which the Palestine Exploration Fund has so long and so deservedly enjoyed; and the new school would reap the advantage of the experience and co-operation of the old Society. Is it too much to hope that the influence of Dr Smith's work, which marks an epoch in Biblical study, may stimulate the support which is needed in order to make this scheme a reality?

C. F. BURNEY.

Art. 5.-GOLF DURING THIRTY YEARS.

1. Golf.

The Badminton Library of Sports and Pastimes.' Edited by the Duke of Beaufort. London: Longmans, 1890.

2. Golf: a Royal and Ancient Game. Edited by Robert Clark. London: Macmillan, 1893.

3. The Life of Tom Morris, with glimpses of St Andrews and its Golfing Celebrities. By W. W. Tulloch, D.D. London: Werner Laurie, 1907.

It is recorded in a great book that a certain don of Oxford, after his first introduction to the game of golf, defined it as the pastime of 'putting little balls into little holes with instruments singularly ill-adapted to the purpose.' Why should the author of this inspired phrase be denied due recognition? It was Mr William Little, fellow and tutor of Corpus. Had his inspiration taken the line of prophecy, instead of that of definition, and been equally successful and exact, it is difficult to think that any who heard him would have paid heed to his words, so far beyond all reasonable expectation has been the development-among all conditions and both sexes-of that pastime of putting the little balls into the little holes; for the definition is now thirty years old; and in the interval important things have happened.

It is not very easy to perceive how any pastime could make so great a change as has actually taken place; and the change itself, though thirty years is not a very long while, has been so gradual that even the fact is not quite obvious, just because it lies before our eyes. It is so obvious that we hardly notice it. Yet if we look at the map, or even if we take a mental tour around the coast, we find a great number of watering-places which practically owe their existence to golf. Men, with their families, visit them for a month or six weeks in the holiday time of the year, or by themselves, without their domestic encumbrances, for a few days or a week-end' at other seasons. Golf is the very life of these places. Were it not for the golf they would not exist. Without it they would never have come into being, and if it were withdrawn they would die of inanition. Those which have the attraction of a good golf course can dispense with any

other attraction, and have so strong an attraction in the golf, pure and simple, that they can draw away all the visitors, with all their money, from places which have every other attraction except the golf. I propose in this paper to review the influence of the coming of golf, with its great and engrossing fascination, on those classes which it affects.

How considerable is the difference between the condition, that is to say the universal favour, of golf in England to-day and its state when the present writer was at Oxford, that is from 1878 to 1882, may be gauged by the sensation which golf-clubs used to cause at a railway station in those days. Nowadays, the only sensation induced by them is that of weight on the back of the porter who bears them. Formerly, you might watch simple folk gathered around them with that grin on their faces which the ignorant always wear when they see a thing that is new to them and yet not formidable enough to be terrifying. Even years later than that it was only necessary to tell a man that you were a golfer, and he would at once consider you a fool, regarding you perhaps with that gentle pity which an international Rugby football player might feel for a man who was introduced to him with the recommendation that he had played ping-pong or diabolo for England. But in 1880, if you told a man you were a golfer, he did not form any opinion of you on that account at all, for the word implied nothing to him. He looked at you vaguely and asked you what you meant, just you meant, just as the porters and others at the railway stations asked you what 'them sticks be for?' To get a bird's-eye view of the situation a little more clearly, let us take a glance at the dates of the institution of a few of the earlier English clubs.

We have, of course, the immemorial antiquity of the Royal Blackheath Golf Club. That is an institution founded, as the claim is laid, by James I. We need not, for the present purpose, enter the bunkers of historical debate over the justice of that claim. The Blackheath Club existed, but it was a barren stock; and the same unkindly word has to be said of the Old Manchester Club which dates back to 1818. In 1829 was founded the Calcutta Golf Club; in 1842 that of Bombay; in 1856 the club at Pau in France. Some forty Scottish clubs

are of age to have held their jubilee; but, except for those two above named, not one golf club was in existence in England or Ireland fifty years ago.

The first sign of the coming boom,' the first step in the advance of the great golfing army, as yet hardly enlisted, was the institution of the Royal North Devon Club, with its links at Westward Ho in 1864. This notable milestone on the road was due to the accidental visit to Northam, the neighbouring village, of a St Andrews resident and ardent golfer. His appreciative eye noted the Northam Burrows'-as the common land is called, on part of which the Westward Ho course is laid out as admirably adapted by nature for golf. The next institution of the kind is that of the London Scottish Golf Club, associated with the Rifle Volunteer corps of that name, which exercised on Wimbledon Common. This was started in 1865, Lord Wemyss (then Lord Elcho) being, I believe, a moving spirit. Others than members of the Rifle corps were admitted as members of the golf club, which thus provided an outlet for the golfing energies of Scots resident in London. The Royal Liverpool Club, playing at Hoylake, on the Cheshire side of the Mersey, was formed in 1869, five years later than that of Westward Ho which was the first of English seaside courses. Then there was something of a halt, or marking of time, for some years, with the recruiting of the army proceeding slowly. A new start forward was made about the year 1880 and onwards. The Royal Isle of Wight Club, at Bembridge, was formed in 1882; and, if there was any institution of a seaside club between that and the Royal Liverpool Club's formation in 1869, it has not come under my notice. It was not till 1885 that Dr Laidlaw Purnes made his great golfing discovery of Sandwich, which has resulted in the wonderful three courses of Sandwich, Deal, and Prince's, now side by side.

Several inland courses had been formed in the meantime, including that of the Crookham Club, near Newbury, which was within reach from Oxford, and the Oxford University Club's course itself, first of a few holes only on Port Meadow, then over the cricket grounds, in the winter terms, on Cowley Marsh. Cambridge was playing on Coldham Common by about 1876; but few undergraduates at either university were sufficiently

advanced or sufficiently Scottish to understand what golf meant. I can remember that what astonished them most about it was that it could be played in a man's ordinary clothes. Accustomed as they were to the 'flannelled fool and the muddied oaf,' they could not conceive what kind of a game this might be that could be played without its peculiar garb. The red coat was at that time worn by a good many golfers. It was sometimes said that no man ought to wear a red coat till he had been round under a hundred. In those days it took more skill than it takes now to go round under three figures. Nowadays it seems that no one ever wears a red coat unless he can not go round under a hundred, except on some of those suburban courses where it is de rigueur, its purpose being similar to that of the red flag carried before the traction engine-to act as a danger signal to the pedestrian.

Just as golf has called into existence, and kept in affluence, many a watering-place on the coast, just as it has caused a demand at a high figure for land of the character that is technically called 'links,' that is to say, of the starved, sandy kind that will hardly support the life of any herbivorous animal except the rabbit, so it has acted nearer the centres of civilisation, especially around London and other large towns, in making valuable that which was practically of no value for any other object, and in enhancing the rental of land and houses. Many an impoverished landed proprietor, in these days of the shrinkage of agricultural rent, has found his salvation in letting or selling the least valuable portion of his estate to a golf club or golfing syndicate; and, while he thus obtains a good rental for that which under other conditions would return him none, the value of other land in the neighbourhood of the golf course has advanced enormously. Even fifteen years ago the houseagents would tell you that the annual rental of an unfurnished house of, say, twelve bedrooms, would be enhanced by something like 50l. if it happened to be in the vicinity of a tolerably good course. By way of a concrete example, it may be noted that a very common price for fair building-land in the neighbourhood of the Walton Heath course is at the rate of 7001. and that 1000l. per acre has been paid.

per acre,