The references to Jos Sedley, the buffoon in Vanity Fair, underscores the scope of Darwin's literary erudition, if not his uncanny ability to always fit the quote to the situation at hand. It is a difficult task indeed to find a paragraph in Mostly Golf free of a literary snippet. Darwin was as at home writing an introduction to The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations as he was smashing a niblick off the Kentish heath.

Darwin venerated Dickens and could recite Tom Brown's Schooldays by heart, but his taste in literature reflects his deeply ingrained Victorian sensibilities. Mostly Golf contains a rather moving essay entitle "Dickens in Time of War," written in 1915 before Darwin found himself running an Ordinance Depot in Mesopotamia. Darwin's stories are cluttered with chestnuts of wisdom from stories are cluttered with chestnuts of wisdom from Sam and Tony Weller while the cricket match between Dingley Dell and All Muggleton in the Pickwick Papers was for Darwin the penultimate tribute to the glories of English countrified society.

A SOBER Victorian sense of priorities effected Darwin's style of golf reporting as well. He believed in opening a story with a leisurely reflection on the weather and any other aspect of the day's events that struck his fancy. In those years, two rounds were played on the final day of a tournament so Darwin would digest the morning round over a midday meal. Afterwards, he would compose his article while sipping port, always for he did not believe in taking highlights out of sequence. This dignified attitude is transparent in what is considered the most famous line Darwin ever penned. "Then it was time to go to tea," he wrote after watching only the first two holes of Henry Cotton's record shattering round of 65 in the 1934 British Open.

Although he lived to 1961, Darwin was patently a 19th century figure whose values are closer to those espoused at the Battle of Waterloo than to those of the present. The cult of Darwinia surrounding his personal escapades almost transforms him into a character out of a P.G. Wodehouse novel. He played in the 1921 British Amateur Championship and eliminated the last American contender in the field. That same night, Darwin was accosted on a lonely street by a mysterious stranger who bellowed, "Sir, I would like to thank you for the way in which you saved your country."

His cousin Gwen Raverat in a family memoir describes Darwin on his fourteenth birthday "lying with his long Etonian legs on the sofa in a negligent, grown-up attitude." While at Eton, Darwin engaged in quoting contests to see who knew Pickwick Papers the best. He practiced for these contests by seeing if he could continue out loud once he reached the bottom of a page. Certainly, Darwin would have ascribed to the Duke of Wellington's statement that "the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton," for he considered the English public school, as epitomized in Tom Brown's Schooldays, to be the great builder of the moral of the age.

ONE THE GOLF COURSE, Darwin brought the same irascible Victorian dogmatism both in his demeanor and his ornate 19th century swing. Accustomed to the Norfolk jackets and knickers worn in earlier decades, Darwin was confronted by a Canadian pro wearing a lumber-jacket shirt with clashing patches of rainbow colors at the 1955 Commonwealth Games. Unable to pacify his aesthetic indigation, Darwin approached the Canadian and said: "I say, are those your old school colors or your own unfortunate choice?"

Darwin truly was a devotee of the old school and although the selections in every way retain their infectious appeal, it is best to relish Mostly Golf in the Pickwickian sense. One is transported into a long forgotten and a more idyllic world that belies reality. Mostly Golf conveys the indian summer tranquillity of Victorian England before the First otherwise sleepy hamlets turned out for cricket matches and the landed aristocracy played over the heath and whins of sedate seaside links.

Perhaps it is best to remember Darwin's genius and the society in which it found its calling by a paragraph from "The Evening Round." Darwin wrote this essay after reading over his boyhood diary and discovering that he usually played his first eighteen of the spring sometime during the past week. Long after those youthful eighteens, he recalls.

There is something magical about the first rounds of spring, so that we remember some of them long, long after we have played them, not on account of any petty personal triumphs or disasters, but from the pure joy of being alive, club in hand. There was one Easter half at school, when the sun was so hot and the ground so dry that I lay and basked on the grass between shots. I can see the particular spot now, just after turning away from the river and the terrific short hole with the solitary willow behind the green. There was another round at Sandwich, a first round on that noble course before a first University match. There was no lying on the grass that time, but a rush straight from the station to the club-house, and a race round the course in a blue serge suit to beat the fading daylight. Yet the same ecstatic glory hangs round the memories of both rounds; I know that in the first of them my driver had a brown head, and in the second a yellow one, or perhaps, since the occasion was so romantic, I should say, of palest gold...

The men and rounds chronicled by Darwin will not come back but in Mostly Golf we at least get a vivid if all too fleeting glimpse of the pageantry and splendor that belonged to the likes of James Braid, Bobby Jones, the olive-skinned Gene Sarazen with his Cheshire Cat grin, and "the Haig" with his oriental eyelids and brilliantined hair bestriding the fairways of Muirfield. For as the Scotch have been wont to say since those colorful days of James II: they were all "grand gowfers a', nane better."