Rudyard Kipling, the poet and novelist who, perhaps more than any
other writer of this generation, has voiced the militant spirit of
the British empire, was born at Bombay, India, December 30, 1865. His
father was John Lockwood Kipling. Rudyard was educated at the United
Services college, Devonshire, England. Returning to India at the end of
his school days, he became the assistant editor of the Civil-Military
Gazette, and subsequently was connected with the staff of the Pioneer,
a prominent newspaper of the country. The well-known Soldiers Three
series and those other of his works which have to do with army life
in India were the outcome of his Pioneer experiences. In 1892 he
married Caroline Balestier at Brattleboro, Vermont. Mr. Kipling has not
only a marvelous faculty of describing things as they actually are,
but he also has the prophetic instinct of the true poet. As a case
in point may be cited his famous Recessional, written at the end of
Queen Victoria’s Jubilee. The full significance of the poem was only
realized by the British during the disastrous and humiliating periods
of the Boer war. In prose and poetry he has been alike fruitful.