The Grand Discovery, Or, the Fatherhood of God

by George Gilfillan

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118 pages, Hardcover

Published May 19, 2016

About the author

The Rev. George Gilfillan was a Scottish author, editor, literary commentator and poet. He contributed memoirs and critical dissertations to many books of poetry.

Gilfillan was a son of the Rev. Samuel Gilfillan, a Secession minister, and Rachel Barlas. He studied at the University of Glasgow and was licensed by the Presbytery of Edinburgh as a probationer in 1835. In the following year he was ordained as minister of the School Wynd church in Dundee, a post he would hold for the rest of his life. Later that year he married Margaret Valentine, daughter of a farmer and factor in Kincardineshire. He was actively involved Dundee's cultural societies and a key figure in the city's literary life in the mid-Nineteenth Century, encouraging and championing local working class poets.

Gilfillan published a volume of his discourses in 1839, and shortly afterwards a sermon on Hades, which brought him under the scrutiny of his co-presbyters, and was ultimately withdrawn from circulation.

Gilfillan next contributed a series of sketches of celebrated contemporary authors to the Dumfries Herald, then edited by Thomas Aird; these, with several new ones, formed his first Gallery of Literary Portraits, which appeared in 1846 and had a wide circulation. It was quickly followed by a Second and a Third Gallery.

In 1851 his most successful work, The Bards of the Bible, appeared. His aim was that it should be a poem on the Bible and it was far more rhapsodical than critical, being in Gilfillan's words 'a Prose Poem, or Hymn, in honour of the Poetry and Poets of the inspired volume with occasional divergence into the analysis of Scripture characters, and cognate fields of literature or of speculation '. His Martyrs and Heroes of the Scottish Covenant appeared in 1832, and in 1856 he produced a partly autobiographical, partly fabulous, History of a Man. From 1853 to 1860 he was occupied with editing Cassell's 48-volume Library Edition of the British Poets.

In 1858 he published a 3-volume edition of Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, consisting of old heroic ballads, songs, and other pieces from earlier poets, authoring a prefatory 'Memoir and Critical Dissertation' entitled Life of Thomas Percy, Bishop of Dromore; with Remarks on Ballad Poetry. Although Gilfillan and Charles Cowden Clarke published the Reliques for Cassell in 1877, Gilfillan's 1858 edition was simultaneously published by James Nichol in Edinburgh, in London by James Nisbet, and in Dublin by W. Robertson, appealing to ready markets in Scotland and Ireland.

For thirty years he was engaged upon a long poem, Night, which was finally published in ten parts in 1867.

As a lecturer and as a preacher Gilfillan drew large crowds, but his literary reputation proved temporary. He died, aged 65, having just finished a new life of Burns designed to accompany a new edition of the works of that poet.