beast; a beautiful characteristic of our great writer is his
tenderness for every living thing. He will be missed by men, women,
children, and by the humblest animals; and if trees have any
self-consciousness, they will miss him too.

Rudyard Kipling is a Victorian poet, as Thomas Hardy is a Victorian
novelist. When Tennyson died in 1892, the world, with approximate
unanimity, chose the young man from the East as his successor, and for
twenty-five years he has been the Laureate of the British Empire in
everything but the title. In the eighteenth century, when Gray
regarded the offer of the Laureateship as an insult, Mr. Alfred Austin
might properly have been appointed; but after the fame of Southey, and
the mighty genius of Wordsworth and of Tennyson, it was cruel to put
Alfred the Little in the chair of Alfred the Great. It was not an
insult to Austin, but an insult to Poetry. With the elevation of the
learned and amiable Dr. Bridges in 1913, the public ceased to care who
holds the office. This eminently respectable appointment silenced both
opposition and applause. We can only echo the language of Gray's
letter to Mason, 19 December, 1757: "I interest myself a little in the
history of it, and rather wish somebody may accept it that will
retrieve the credit of the thing, if it be retrievable, or ever had
any credit.... The office itself has always humbled the professor
hitherto (even in an age when kings were somebody), if he were a poor
writer by making him more conspicuous, and if he were a good one by
setting him at war with the little fry of his own profession, for
there are poets little enough to envy even a poet-laureat." Mason was
willing.

Rudyard Kipling had the double qualification of poetic genius and of
convinced Imperialism. He had received a formal accolade from the aged