GILFILLAN, George (1813-1878), a clergyman of the United Presbyterian Church of Scotland, and a well-known popular writer, was born 30th January 1813 at Comrie, Perthshire, where his father, the Rev. Samuel Gilfillan, also a man of some literary activity, was for many years minister of a Secession congregation. At Glasgow University and the theological hall, as at Comrie school, he took small help from formal lessons, and cared little for a high place in his classes or for proficiency in his prescribed studies, but applied himself to English literature, with a passion for reading, and a memory which held fast and arranged the contents of all the congenial books he met with. In March 1836 he was ordained pastor of a Secession congregation in Dundee. His first effort beyond the pulpit was in 1839, when he issued Five Discourses, which, though neglected by the reading public, had many high merits, and gave the promise of more and of higher. Some time afterwards he rather unadvisedly published a sermon on “Hades,” which, distinguished by bold but ill-sustained speculation, and by brilliant but irregular imagination, brought him under the scrutiny of his co-presbyters, and was ultimately withdrawn from circulation. Gilfillan next contributed a series of sketches of celebrated literary men to the Dumfries Herald, then edited by Thomas Aird; and these, along with several new ones formed his first Gallery of Literary Portraits, a volume which appeared in 1846, and had a wide circulation. It was quickly followed by a Second and a Third Gallery, until almost all our great men were delineated. In 1851 the Bards of the Bible appeared; and this has been his most successful work. His aim was that it should be “a poem on the Bible ”; and it was far more rhapsodical than ...critical. Still the little criticism that was scattered throughout it was more than enough to keep it from soaring into poetry; and the poetry, when pure, was so fragmentary, that instead of making one poem, it consisted of many small pieces, though in these there were grand strokes and exquisite touches of description. His sketching powers were next exercised upon the “Scottish Covenanters,” and some of the heroes and episodes of the struggle received a glowing commemoration. At a later date he published similar representations of English Puritans and of Scotch Seceders, as champions of the rights of conscience. The most extensive publication with which Gilfillan was connected was Nichol’s edition of the British Poets ; and his office was not only to secure the utmost accuracy in the text of each poet’s works, but also to furnish both a biography and a critical estimate. This engagement, taking him again and leisurely through the studies in which he had most delighted, and with which he had been most conversant, stimulated him to finish the work on which he had resolved in youth, and to which he had long given the brightest moods of his most genial hours. Night, a Poem, came out in 1867, when he was fifty-four years of age; but the work which had received his labour and his polishing during his best thirty years was far less successful than his most ephemeral productions. It was, indeed, an absolute failure. The theme was vast, vague, and unmanageable, even though the poem had extended to ninety, instead of nine books. Then, though his nature was largely and essentially poetic, Gilfillan had never given himself a training or even any practice in verse. Besides he had already, in his many prose volumes, made use of all his poetic ideas and illustrations. There was not a line in Night that had not often sounded forth in his essays with stronger and finer melody. It was but a faint echo, and it had no music. His History of a Man, partly autobiographic and largely fabulous, was not written with his usual candour and geniality. Not less abundant and striking than his literature was his oratory; and wherever he appeared as a preacher, or as a lecturer on some literary or secular theme, he drew large crowds that were invariably thrilled by his eloquence. There was no token either of physical or of mental exhaustion when he died suddenly of heart disease, in the summer of 1878. He had just finished a new life of Burns designed to accompany a new edition of the works of that poet.
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