Rudyard Kipling.
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.