Page:Out-door Games Cricket and Golf (1901).djvu/19

4 and the didactic treatise. W. G. Grace, Daft, Giffen, and Caffyn have given the first kind, and the Badminton and the Oval series the second.

Golf has the great advantage of numbering amongst its great players a man who to his great skill as a golfer has added a fine gift of writing. Mr. Horace Hutchinson has laid down the proper principles by which golf is to be learnt. He has also charmingly given us a series of pictures of golf links, and in fact it may almost be said that he has told us everything, and has exhausted the subject of golf. But of golf, as of cricket, it may be said that the golfing novel has yet to be written. Mr. Surtees may have found out and produced the one form in which a sporting novel may be produced, and so covered the ground that any subsequent effort must more or less be a form of imitation. It only needs, however, an author with the necessary gifts, and both a cricket and a golf novel can then be produced. Golf, however, though of ancient date in Scotland, is, as far as England is concerned, quite a new plant. The stage of reminiscence has not yet arrived, though it certainly will some day, and the didactic so far has held the field.