It is true that Mr Kipling is lawless and contemptuous of literary formality; and that whenever he talks of "Art," as in certain pages of _The Light That Failed_, he tries to talk as though there were really no such thing. But Mr Kipling's cheerful contempt of all that is pedantic and magisterial in "Art" does not imply that he is innocent of literary discipline. It is true that Mr Kipling is lawless in the sense that all good work is more than a conscious adherence to formula. It is not true in the sense that Mr Kipling is more lawless than Tennyson or Walter Scott. Readers of Mr Kipling's stories must not be misled by his buccaneering contempt for formal art. Mr Kipling's art is as formal as the art of Wilde, or the art of Baudelaire, which he helped to send out of fashion. A few preliminary words are necessary (1) as to the half-dozen dates which bear upon Mr Kipling's authorship and (2) as to the arrangement of his works here to be followed. Mr Kipling was born in 1865, the son of J. Lockwood Kipling, C.I.E. His intimacy with India was determined at birth. He was educated at the United Services College, Westward Ho, but was again in India in 1882, as assistant editor on _The Civil and Military Gazette_ and _The Pioneer_. He remained on the staff of _The Pioneer_ for seven years, and travelled over the five continents. By this time he had learned to think of the world as a place rather more diversified than a walk from Charing Cross to Whitehall would lead one to imagine; to see something of men upon its frontiers, and to love England as men do who come back to her from the ends of the earth. The whole of Mr Kipling's literary biography is contained in the fact that Mr Kipling has been a great traveller who is now inveterately at home.