mate of men and events, as his comment on Napoleon after the annexation of Nice and Savoy witnesses: "It was a great action, but he has taken eighteenpence for it, which is a pity." However deep his feelings in this respect, nationality was not the subject most calculated to quicken his imagination. He had not that passion of abstract patriotism which glows in Shelley or Foscolo. Love of the fitful and the grotesque, of whatever is at war with itself, was too integral a part of his nature for nationality to be to him a wholly congenial theme. The directness of the epic poet is not his. One cannot read "The Italian in England," "De Gustibus," or the third part of "Pippa Passes" without realizing the earnestness of his convictions or the depth of his sympathy. The theme brings out the full chivalry of his heart and mind. Consider the tender painting of the peasant woman

But when I saw that woman's face,
Its calm simplicity of grace,
Our Italy's own attitude

In which she walked thus far, and stood,

Planting each naked foot so firm, To crush the snake and spare the worm,

or that cry from the heart, "Italy, my Italy," and the last lines

Such lovers old are I and she,

So it always was, so shall ever bewhich close the poem on a note of seriousness which the whimsicality of the couplet

When fortune's malice
Lost her-Calais

might seem to endanger.

But this is not patriotism per se. There is always a human interest which cannot be detached from it. His ghost will return to Italy, but it will crave society if only of a chattering peasant girl. The Italian in England makes his appeal as an exile

rather than as a sufferer in a specific cause; and it is the relationship between the fugitive and the woman who succors him that forms the marrow of the poem.

We may regret that he has not left a more imposing monument of his devotion to a great national struggle, but it must be remembered that, after all. this aspect of the Italian life of the time has lacked neither poets nor historians, and it is a vain labor to expect fruit from the mountain or flowers from the sea. If we wish to know how the Italian prisoners fared in the Spielberg we have Pellico's "Le Mie Prigioni"; if our quest is the popular feeling we turn to Giusti and Fusinato. The Garibaldian epic which inspired Carducci and D'Annunzio has found its historian in Mr. Trevelyan. Other things existed in Italy besides patriotism. Browning found there nature and, even more completely, art and music.

He has painted the Italian landscape with a bold brush; the splendor of its coloring glows in his poems; but it is, neverthless, only the setting for the drama. It is very rarely that it becomes itself an actor; though in at least one poem he admits nature as a "shadowy third" at the meeting of the lovers. The woods of an Alpine gorge mysteriously break down the barriers between lover and beloved; but after a momentary intervention they retire into their original passive state.

Their work was done, we might go or stay.

They relapsed to their ancient mood. Apart from their value as evidence of Browning's attitude towards music, the "Toccata" of Baldassare Galuppi has, with the songs of Pippa, a peculiar interest, as in these one seems to catch an echo of the voice of an Italy which was then passing and is now no longer.

In the half-mocking and almost contemptuous lines of the "Toccata" there are suggestions of decay, of death, which fit the Venice of Browning's day far better than the gay lines of Byron. The Venice

where the Doges

Used to wed the sea with rings

had set for ever, and the city had to pass through the ordeal of war and strife and famine before it could be born anew. That Pippa has entirely disappeared it would be rash to affirm, though we hope that Ottima and her lover have gone for ever. But it is difficult to imagine Pippa and her song in the busy streets of, say, Busto Arsizio or any of the other conglomeration of mills and houses so unpleasant but significant a feature of modern Italy. It is the penalty of material advance to lose such as Pippa and Fortù. Not in England alone

Men meet gravely to-day and debate

It were idle to complain of the progress of time and to speculate whether things are changed for better or for worse. These aspects of life were in Browning's day a very essential part of the nation. To-day, if they still exist, they have lost their significance. Another revolution has shaken Italy since the unity, a revolution which up-rooted long-cherished ideals and habits of generations, turning an agricultural into an industrial people.

"Sordello" and "The Ring and the Book" suggest another reason why Browning's fame is not as wide in Italy as that of other English poets of less merit. Truly translation cannot lead. It must follow in the wake of scholarship. But the follower can sometimes jostle the leader, and in any case translation can be a valuable handmaiden. "Sordello" and "The

Ring and the Book" are impossible of translation because they are, in a sense, totally alien to the spirit of Italian poetry, though admirable and true pictures of Italian life, probably for the same reasons that the Italian literature, rich and valuable as it is, has never produced an essayist. The Italian character is too eager and too impatient to fall easily into the mood of quiet contemplation, into the coolly critical attitude of the essayist. The Italians are still-though less now than formerly-partisans. In 1868, while

The

Browning was occupied with the composition of "The Ring and the Book," the Milanese, who a few years previously had driven ignominiously the foreign invader from their gates, were fighting less glorious battles on the merits and demerits of an opera. stage had played its not inglorious part in the national struggle, and was consequently looked upon as something of a national heritage, but the hand-tohand contest which took place after the first performance of Boito's "Mefistofele" would have been impossible in a country in which reason held imagination in a firmer grip.

If proof were needed of Browning's insight into Italian character one need only point to the sonnet he wrote on the occasion of the unveiling of the monument to that most Italian of all Italian playwrights, Goldoni. No one was more shortsighted than Voltaire when he described Goldoni as Italy's Molière; for Goldoni's excellences lay in a widely different direction from Molière's. But Browning's "Sunniest of Souls" applies well to him who could see but innocent amusement and kindness in the French life at the close of the eighteenth century, and who never had a suspicion of the approach of that revolution which caused him to end his days in abject poverty.

In his last volume, "Asolando," the failing powers of the poet do not im

pair his interest in Italian subjects. The roguish "Pope and the Net" or the more gently humorous "Beanfeast" are episodes of clerical life handled in a manner only possible to a sympathetic outsider. The epilogue embodies in its robust idealism the very soul of Mazzini's teaching and the essence of the Italian revolution. The Spectator.

Never doubted clouds would break, Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph. Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better.

This is surely the spirit of that Italian who, when told to cease fighting because the gods were against him, cried out, "Cur non proelia contra Jovem ?"

The archæology of golf, as of other things, comes to an end just when the game appears. Under James II. of Scotland (ascended 1437) the game was developed enough to be proscribed by royal edict among "other sic unproffitable sportis." It was "the gouff" already, but how long had it been in existence and where did it come from?

From the middle of the fifteenth century we have to fall back upon a group of European games, resembling, in some cases, hockey; in others, croquet; and to imagine as best we can the genesis of golf from their midst.

According to Jusserand, our best authority, all the games and sports of mediæval England came from France. We need not here dispute this proposition, but neither need we accept it. Let us glance at this group of stickand-ball games played more or less everywhere in Europe before the fifteenth century, but particularly in France.

There is first the game of soule, solle, choule, or cholle, still played as a form of village football, resembling the Cornish hurling, in Brittany, Picardy, and elsewhere in France. It was enormously popular by the fourteenth century, and probably can be traced back to the twelfth. We have to note that in these early times a game had as a rule no specific name. The usual phrases were "playing at or with" the

specifically named ball or instrument of percussion. The term soule practically always has reference to the ball. We shall see later the importance of this fact. In the next place, though "playing at the soule" generally denotes what we should style football, yet as early as the thirteenth century we find "playing at the soule with a crosse." Ducange defines choullaglobulus ligneus [qui] clava propellitur. But the globulus was a large ball, comparatively speaking, in soule proper, and either inflated or stuffed with moss and the like. In soule de la crosse it was either stuffed or wooden, and probably tended to be of smaller size-globulus, whereas in soule proper it was often described as a ballon.

For centuries the crosse was the main type of all the various forms of stick or club used in the mediaval stick-and

ball games. As the name implies and mediæval drawings prove, it was a "crook," very similar to the modern hockey-stick. A stick of this shape is universal throughout the world; it remains in use as a walking-stick, the crook forming a handle, by which in the latest fashion it may be hung on the arm. Other applications of it, both still surviving, are the shepherd's crook and the pastoral staff, the crozier, of ecclesiastical shepherds. In both these cases the crooked end serves, literally, or metaphorically, to jerk back

errant sheep to the fold or the narrow way. From it are derived the hockeysticks and the golf-clubs of the present time.

Leaving it for the moment, we pass to another mediæval game. There is extant a receipt, dated 1147, for ten martelli, and seven maximi ballones. Here is primitive croquet on the way to its parallel development in pall mall, le jeu du mail. Pall mall attained an extraordinary popularity, and was both aristocratic and democratic by the sixteenth century. It consisted in hitting a wooden ball about the size of a tennis-ball with a mallet lighter and smaller and longer in the handle than a croquet mallet. Unlike croquet, it included long driving, the ball being driven off the ground, and drives of 200 yards being recorded. For the drive-off the ball was teed. The object of the game was to reach a mark, such as a stone or tree, in the fewest strokes, and, as in golf, each player had his own ball and played for his own hand, except when more than two played. In the case of, say, two against two, the players formed sides, but each man had a ball of his own. The game is still played at Montpellier. In medieval times we find, e.g. in 1350, the name chuque given to the ball. Throughout we can detect the game by the use of the mallet, the "hammer" of 1147, the mailhetus of 1350. There is a curious sidelight on mediæval sport in the fact that the documents which mention the martel or malleus used to propel the ball are generally legal, dealing with summonses against players who smote other players' heads instead of their own balls.

Thongh crook and mallet are such distinct forms, it is easy to realize that in their earlier and cruder shapes they might be interchangeable. We actually find in fifteenth-century drawings players aiming at a mark, a stick fixed in the ground as at croquet, with a club

resembling a modern wooden putter but as large as a man's foot. The shape of the club or stick being an important clue to the genesis of these games, it is worth while looking into the possibilities of both artificial and natural forms. A croquet mallet with the head set at an angle may be used like a hockey-stick. But it is better, obviously, without a heel. A hockey-stick with a hammer-headed toe may be used like a croquet mallet. But it is better with a heel. The natural forms of sticks, branches of young trees with a head formed by a piece of the stem, saplings with a crooked root, suggest both methods of hitting a ball. The former, if heeled, is already a mallet, but with an angle. The hammer would suggest a right-angle setting. There is still another natural form, the clubshaped branch or sapling. When straight, it is a club for breaking heads, the war-mace; when crooked, it has the angle appropriate for hitting a ball on the ground. From this our cricketbat came. Cutting the surface which meets the ball, so as to make a plane face, was an obvious improvement. Already in the middle ages the crosse was shoed and faced with iron. Lastly, the more the crook approaches the form with a flat, instead of a semi-circular, head, the more suitable is it for balls, though not for sheep; and, clearly enough, the hockey-stick type is earlier than the mallet type, for the latter in nature has its head at an angle.

Golf, then, comes direct from a special method of playing ball with the crosse. But the crosse was not necessarily French; it is practically universal, as we suggested. Pall mall may be, as Mr. Lang describes it, "the sister of golf," but that is all. Mr. Lang (in the Badminton "Golf") leans to a derivation of golf from la soule, or at least to that of the name golf from chole. We have now to consider the etymological aspect of the problem.

Choule, chole, is still applied in Belgium to a sort of jeu du mail aux grands coups. It has no other resemblance to golf. Nor, by the way, has the Dutch game, het kolven, played as a sort of croquet in the courts of inns, any resemblance to golf, and the popular notion that golf comes from kolf (a bat or butt end) and golf from het kolven is a superficial error. Under James VI. of Scotland (ascended 1567) the Scotch bought balls from Holland to play golf in Scotland. But the game was played in Scotland more than 150 years before, and was not played in Holland even when the Dutch made feather balls.

Of course in an earlier form, as seen in the place-name Golfdrum, it was "golf," and equally, of course, both golf and kolf derive like the German kolbe from an ancient Teutonic cholbo, and the hypothetical Gothic kulban. The ancient term means a stick with a head, a club, and "club" is probably a derivative. Mr. Lang suggests a Keltic form of this old word. Returning to soule, or chole, we may reject Ducange's derivation from solea, "because the ball was hit with the sole of the foot," which of course it was not. As for its derivation from cholbo, we must remember that this meant a club, while soule generally refers to the ball. the German Kügel is ball, but the English "cudgel" is club; and chole seems to be Belgian for stick. Such confusion is natural, and may have often occurred. Thus Ducange notes that crosse sometimes meant "ball." All the same, choule might just as well derive from the Teutonic word which gave the German Kügel. In any case golf does not come from la choule, nor the word golf either.

Yet

But how do we get the Teutonic word in Scotland? In Scots dialects gowf occurs, meaning a blow with the open hand. Is the word Keltic (original Scots) or Teutonic? It is very old,

but Scotland was particularly a Northman's country from the ninth century to the thirteenth, the Lowlands were largely Danish, the North and the Western Islands Norwegian. Now the ancient Scandinavians, like many other peoples, had a ball-game played with cudgels, the knattleike, soppleike, or sköfuleike, and the cudgel was knattbrê (so Weinhold). But the Old Norse and Icelandic usual term for a cudgel was kolfr, from the old Teutonic root. The Northmen were great adapters if not creators of games. But the Scots golf is probably older than their advent, and so probably is the game. The fact that it is first mentioned in Scots documents goes far to show that it originated in Scotland, as is appropriate.

The two salient features of the game, apart from the club, are the making of the hole in as few strokes as possible, and the use of holes as marks. The latter seems to have belonged to early varieties of crosse, and the former was common in the days of pall mall. Hence we cannot, with Mr. Lang, exclude French influence on account of the hole system. But everything else points to a Scots origin of the game and a Keltic (Scots) origin of the name, unless perchance Scandinavian assisted in this.

It may well be that, as Professor Patrick Geddes fancied, it was rabbitholes (on the S. Andrews foreshore) that suggested a mark for the golfball. He imagined a shepherd tending sheep on that narrow strip of pasture; his Viking blood (Scandinavian influence again) prompted him to combine exercise with his meditative occupation. He therefore swung his shepherd's crook at the white pebbles. The rabbit-holes, at first by accident, suggested a mark. Certainly the singlehanded character of golf is an element that needs more explanation than the Continental games supply. When