The Gods of the Copybook Headings - Kipling 

Great setting Mark, has been fun to do more Kipling.

Could the odd rhymes be a deliberate attempt to sound like from an older time that parsed as having had some kind of wisdom or understanding the modern age of progress was losing? Kipling must have been familiar with Shakespeare's works, they're taught in the Anglophone world even today in our schools with much less focus on literature (and more on mathematics, to bump up the test scores), and the idea that writers from long ago had hidden wisdom lost to contemporaries is an idea that has appeared in many times and places throughout human civilizations. It seems to be a natural impulse of Man, perhaps stemming from the same need that makes us listen to and preserve the stories of the past in the first place because they may hold important survival information or other culturally-known truths.