ABSTRACT
Gilfillan (1813-78), a Presbyterian minister, was an industrious author of moral works and editor of the poets. In an anthology of British poetry he gave two poems by Donne-'A Valediction: forbidding Mourning', and 'The Will'-as against two each by Carew and Suckling, three by Beaumont, four each by Jonson, Drummond, Herbert, and Harington, five by Herrick and nine extracts by Shakespeare. He spoke of Donne in his prefatory 'Essay on British Poetry', making a bad start by giving Donne's dates as 1570-1630 (The Book of British Poesy, 1851, pp. xx and 147-51). Gilfillan launched an assault on Johnson's account of the metaphysical poets in an essay on 'The Life and Poetry of Richard Crashaw' which introduces The Poetical Works of Richard Crashaw and Quarles' Emblems, Edinburgh, 1857, pp. xiv-xviii. In a three-volume collection of verses by some less familiar British poets Gilfillan included all sixteen Holy Sonnets then known and the whole of the Metempsychosis, prefacing these poems with a brief account of Donne from which the third extract is taken (Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-Known British Poets, 1860, i, pp. 203-4).
