The private life of Mr. Rudyard Kipling is not a matter of public interest, and I should be very unwilling to exploit it, even if I had the means of doing so. The youngest of living writers should really be protected for a few years longer against those who chirp and gabble about the unessential. All that needs to be known, in order to give him his due chronological place, is that he was born in Bombay in Christmas week, 1865. The careful student of what he has published will collect from it the impression that Mr. Kipling was resident in India at an age when few European children remain there; that he returned to England for a brief period; that he began a career on his own account in India at an unusually early age; that he has led a life of extraordinary vicissitude, as a journalist, as a war correspondent, as a civilian in the wake of the army; that an insatiable curiosity has led him to shrink from no experience that might help to solve the strange riddles of Oriental existence; and that he is distinguished from other active, adventurous, and inquisitive persons in that his capacious memory retains every impression that it captures. Beyond this, all that must here be said about the man is that his stories began to be published--I think about eight years ago--in local newspapers of India, that his first book of verse, _Departmental Ditties_, appeared in 1886, while his prose stories were not collected from a Lahore journal, of which he was the sub-editor, until 1888, when a volume of _Plain Tales from the Hills_ appeared in Calcutta. In the same year six successive pamphlets or thin books appeared in an _Indian Railway Library_, published at Allahabad, under the titles of _Soldiers Three_, _The Gadsbys_, _In Black and White_, _Under the Deodars_, _The Phantom 'Rickshaw_, and _Wee Willie Winkle_. These formed the literary baggage of Mr. Rudyard Kipling, when, in 1889, he came home to find himself suddenly famous at the age of twenty-three. Since his arrival in England Mr. Kipling has not been idle. In 1890 he brought out a Christmas annual called _The Record of Badalia Herodsfoot_, and a short novel, _The Light that Failed_. Already in 1891 he has published a fresh collection of tales called (in America) _Mine Own People_, and a second miscellany of verses. This is by no means a complete record of his activity, but it includes the names of all his important writings. At an age when few future novelists have yet produced anything at all, Mr. Kipling is already voluminous. It would be absurd not to acknowledge that a danger lies in this precocious fecundity. It would probably be an excellent thing for every one concerned if this brilliant youth could be deprived of pens and ink for a few years and be buried again somewhere in the far East. There should be a "close time" for authors no less than for seals, and the extraordinary fulness and richness of Mr. Kipling's work does not completely reassure us.