Kipling

Rudyard, an eminent man of letters. He was born at Bombay, India, December 30, 1865. Both his mother and his father were the children of Wesleyan preachers, of Yorkshire stock. John Lockwood Kipling, his father, was educated in the Staffordshire potteries and in the studio of a sculptor. He went to Bombay as a professor of architectural sculpture in a British school of art established there. Rudyard was named for the village of Rudyard, on a pretty English lake in Staffordshire, where his father and mother first met. His first remembrance is of Bombay and its cosmopolitan life. In 1871 he was put in school in England. His experience was not particularly happy. He was visited by his parents only occasionally. In 1882 he returned to India and secured a position on the Lahore Civil and Military Gazette, one of the most influential papers in India.

Young Rudyard inherited literary ability and likings from both father and mother. As in the case of Dickens, Field, and many another successful writer, his training was that of a newspaper office. He wrote a number of tales and poems for the columns of the Gazette. His first published book, 1886, was a volume of poems, Departmental Ditties. A writer in the London Academy said: "The book gives promise of a new literary star rising in the East." Soldiers Three, stories of barrack-room life; The Story of the Gadsbys, a tale without a plot; In Black and White, stories of native life; Under the Deodars; In Social Byways; The Phantom Rickshaw, and other eerie tales; Wee Willie Winkie, and other child stories; The City of the Dreadful Night; and Letters of Marque, first appeared in the Indian Railway Library of A. H. Wheeler and Company, price, one rupee. They were written in rapid succession, and brought the author a sufficient income to make him independent.

In 1889 Kipling left India. He has traveled widely. He is familiar with southern Asia. He has visited America, China, Japan, and Australia. During the Boer War he went to Africa. In 1892, he married Miss Caroline Balestier, an American girl, the sister of a literary friend. The subsequent four years were spent in a home among the Green Mountains at Brattleboro, Vermont. The Kipling home is now at Rottingdean, on the southern coast of England. In recent years Kipling seems to have lost both his early optimism and virility. He scolds more than he inspires. He has lost confidence in his native country and seems to be trying to make his countrymen suspicious and to fill them with hatred towards their neighbors.

Kipling is a voluminous writer. The Outward Bound edition of his works has reached twenty-four volumes, with more to follow. The titles are:

The decorations and illustrations are of a high order. They are from models in clay by the author's father.

Kipling knows the value of individual words as a mechanic knows the use and importance of different tools, and can turn with perfect ease from the sledge hammer to the awl or file.--F. L. Knowles.

He is of all living writers the most careful and conscientious in the matter of form.--Spectator.