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Mr. Bernard Gilbert is one of the discoveries of the War. For years, it seems, he has been writing poetry, but it is only recently that an inapprehensive country has awakened to the fact. Now he is taking his rightful place among our foremost singers. What William Barnes was to Dorset, what T. E. Brown was to the Manx people—this is Mr. Gilbert to the folk of his native county of Lincoln. He has interpreted their lives, their sorrows, their aspirations, with a surprising fidelity. Mr. Gilbert never loses his grip upon realities. One feels that he knows the men of whom he writes in their most intimate moods; knows, too, their defects, which he does not shrink from recording. There is little of the dreamy idealism of the South in the peasant people of Lincolnshire. The outwardly respectable chapel-goer who asks himself, in a moment of introspection
But why not have a good time here?
Why should the Devil have all the beer?
is true to type. But he has, too, his softer moods. Fidelity in friendship, courage, resource and perseverance—these are typical of the men of the Fens.