terrible, he was ready to proclaim aloud a host of things which had, until then, been kept as decorously in the dark as the skeleton in the family cupboard.  The thousand and one incidents of lust and loot, of dishonesty and brutality and drunkenness—­all of those things to which builders of Empire, like many other human beings, are at times prone—­he never dreamed of treating as matters to be hushed up, or, apparently, indeed, to be regretted.  He accepted them quite frankly as all in the day’s work; there was even a suspicion of enthusiasm in the heartiness with which he referred to them.  Simple old clergymen, with a sentimental vision of an Imperialism that meant a chain of mission-stations (painted red) encircling the earth, suddenly found themselves called upon to sing a new psalm:—­

               Ow, the loot! 
               Bloomin’ loot! 
    That’s the thing to make the boys git up an’ shoot! 
      It’s the same with dogs an’ men,
      If you’d make ’em come again. 
    Clap ’em forward with a Loo!  Loo!  Lulu!  Loot! 
    Whoopee!  Tear ’im, puppy!  Loo!  Loo!  Lulu!  Loot!  Loot!  Loot!

Frankly, I wish Mr. Kipling had always written in this strain.  It might have frightened the clergymen away.  Unfortunately, no sooner had the old-fashioned among his readers begun to show signs of nervousness than he would suddenly feel in the mood for a tune on his Old Testament harp, and, taking it down, would twang from its strings a lay of duty.  “Take up,” he would sing—­

    Take up the White Man’s burden,
      Send forth the best ye breed,
    Go, bind your sons to exile,
      To serve your captives’ need;
    To wait in heavy harness
      On fluttered folk and wild—­
    Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
      Half-devil and half-child.

Little Willie, in the tracts, scarcely dreamed of a thornier path of self-sacrifice.  No wonder the sentimentalists were soon all dancing to the new music—­music which, perhaps, had more of the harmonium than the harp in it, but was none the less suited on that account to its revivalistic purpose.

At the same time, much as we may have been attracted to Mr. Kipling in his Sabbath moods, it was with what we may call his Saturday night moods that he first won the enthusiasm of the young men.  They loved him for his bad language long before he had ever preached a sermon or written a leading article in verse.  His literary adaptation of the unmeasured talk of the barrack-room seemed to initiate them into a life at once more real and more adventurous than the quiet three-meals-a-day ritual of their homes.  He sang of men who defied the laws of man; still more exciting, he sang of men who defied the laws of God.  Every oath he loosed rang heroically in the ear like a challenge to the universe; for his characters talked in a daring, swearing fashion that was new in literature.  One remembers the bright-eyed enthusiasm with which very young men used to repeat to each other lines like the one in The Ballad of “The Bolivar,” which runs—­