The essay begins with a section on Kipling, the man. Professor Dobrée dwells on Kipling's bitter experiences as a child, when he was left in the charge of a woman 'who wielded evangelical Christianity as an instrument of torture'. He learned that man was a lonely creature; he learned also to value a man for what he does rather than for what he feels. His ancestry, which had in it a marked strain of Christian didacticism, predisposed him to live by religious values. His childhood suffering, reinforced by his experience of the world, taught him to sympathize with all faiths that were not cruel, and to involve a curious fatalistic creed of stoical self-abnegation. Professor Dobrée then considers Kipling's qualities as a writer, stressing his inexhaustible curiosity about the world, his artistic integrity, and his consummate mastery of words. His short stories, always brilliant and ingenious, grew ever more complex and mature, and exhibited also a steadily increasing awareness of the need for compassion. In his later stories he found new symbols, particularly those of healing, to evoke his sense of the mystery in which our lives are grounded. The essay concludes with a short but penetrating analysis of Kipling's verse. Bonamy Dobrée stresses Kipling's mastery of technique and claims that he was a true poet, whose variety of theme and mood has not always been properly recognised. The late Bonamy Dobrée, formerly Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Leeds, was educated and trained as a professional soldier. He fought with distinction in the 1914-18 war and also served from 1939 to 1945. His publications cover a wide range of themes, literary and historical, although he is best known as an authority on the literature of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. His many notable publications include Restoration Comedy (1924); Restoration Tragedy (1929); The London Book of English Prose (1931), in collaboration with Herbert Read; The Floating Republic (1935), in collaboration with G. T. Manwaring; and the monumental volume, The Early Eighteenth Century (1959), in the Oxford History of English Literature. He has displayed his sympathetic understanding of contemporary literature in Modern Prose Style (1934), and in The Lamp and the Lute (1929), a revised edition of which was published in 1964. He was General Editor of the Writers and Their Work series from 1954 to 1965.