When this little conversation occurred,
I was out amid the "benty knowes," the
"whin bushes," and the "bunkers" of the
most famous golfing ground in the world,
in the company of an accomplished golfer
who was endeavouring to initiate me into
the mysteries. Before proceeding further
it will be well to explain the words "caddie"
and "golf." "Caddie" in Scottish
parlance originally meant a lad or youth,
from the French cadet. The word now
signifies (and signified in Humphrey Clinker's
time) a man or boy employed to run
errands, or do light jobs of porters' work.
A "caddie" must not be confounded with a
cad, for cad implies snobbishness and
vulgarity, and a caddie may be a very honest
fellow. Indeed, caddies, as a rule, are
hard-working respectable people, and as
such superior to a cad, even if the cad should
happen to be called "your lordship."

"Golf," pronounced goff, is the game
par excellence of Scotsmen, and flourishes
in every part of the world to which Scotsmen
resort and where the climate is not too
tropical to admit of vigorous exercise in
the open air. Wherever any considerable
number of Scots, at home or abroad, reside
in a town or city, contiguous to a moor, a
heath, a common, or a strip of land by the
seashore, large enough for the sport, they
are sure to be seen in the summer and
autumnal afternoons, or the half holidays
snatched from their businesses (in which, as
most people know, they generally manage
to do pretty well), attired in red coats,
that they may know each other in the
distance, their caddies following with a due
supply of clubs of all weights and calibres.
These hearty Scots are engaged in the to
them delightful task of sending a hard
gutta-percha ball flying through the air,
towards a hole at a mile's or half a mile's
distance, and gradually diminishing the
vigour of their blows, as they approach
nearer the hole of their ambition. Most
Londoners who have visited Greenwich,
must at some time or other have observed
the cheery gentlemen who enjoy this sport
at Blackheath. The place is somewhat
too crowded, however, by nursery maids
and donkeys to allow fair scope for the
game—but better a crowded heath than
no heath at all, to the inveterate golfer.
Those, too, whose travels in Scotland have
led them beyond the show-places and the
beaten tracks of the summer tourists, or
who have resided in Edinburgh or its
neighbourhood, must have made acquaintance
with the golfers, either at the links
of Bruntsfield, Leith, Musselburgh, or
Innerleven. If, as King James in the
Fortunes of Nigel advised young Lord
Glenvarloch to do, they have "turned their
nebs northwards and settled for awhile at
St. Andrews," they will have seen golf in
all its glory, and if they read these pages
will not consider inappropriate the new
name which I have taken the liberty to
bestow upon the venerable city.

Nobody knows when the Scotch first
took to this sport; but the word, derived
from the Saxon Kólb, and the Danish
Kolv, a club or mace, points to the game
as an introduction from the European
continent at that early period of Scottish
history when the Scandinavians effected a
settlement upon the eastern coasts of the
island. It is only on the eastern coasts
that golf flourishes, for the western
Highlanders are unacquainted with it, and the
configuration of their country does not lend
itself to a game in which level ground is
necessary. Almost, if not the earliest
mention of golf occurs in a royal edict of
the year 1457, when Scotland was an
independent nation, and nourished such bitter
grudges against England, in the matter of
William Wallace and other grievances, as to
make war between the two countries a
contingency to be always provided for by the
Scottish kings. At that time the passion
of the Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian, and
Lowland Scotch for the game was considered
to be so excessive as to interfere
with the practice of archery, which King
James the Second desired to encourage.
And well he might. Neither he nor any
other Scotsman had ceased to boast of the
glorious victory of Bannockburn, which the
Scottish archers had won, against the best
bowmen of England; and the times were
perilous. England was not only a mighty
neighbour to Scotland, but a troublesome
one, as the fatal field of Flodden proved but
too surely at a later period. James issued a
royal edict, prohibiting both golf and football
under heavy penalties. But he attempted
a feat beyond his power to accomplish.
And he was somewhat illogical and
inconsequential besides, for there was nothing
to prevent a good golfer from being a
good archer. Anyhow, the Scottish people
would not be legislated out of their amusement
in days of peace, though quite ready
to fight for their king and country in days
of war. So they played golf as usual upon
the breezy moorlands and links of their
towns and cities, and the king found none
to make a living law out of his dead edict.
Forty-five years later, and thirteen years
before Flodden—when the Scottish archers