[3] In 1825 he went to study at the University of Glasgow, where his classmates included John Eadie, William Hanna and Archibald Campbell Tait, the future Archbishop of Canterbury.

In 1833 he studied for a year in Mid Calder[4] before moving on to Edinburgh where he received warm encouragement from the professor of moral philosophy, John Wilson, better known as Christopher North.

[2] 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,[7] which appeared in 1846 and had a wide circulation.

[2] For thirty years he was engaged upon a long poem, Night,[9] which was published in 1867, but its theme was too vast, vague and unmanageable, and, according to the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, the result was considered a failure.

[2] This, Gilfillan's major work is in ten parts, he described in his preface as being 'to an extent miscellaneous in its materials, following thus a type which once extensively prevailed in poetry.

In a preface to a book of poems by Janet Hamilton he wrote: The self-taught have usually greater freshness of feeling in beholding nature, and a keener sympathy with men, than the better instructed.

Many see not nature's thunderstorm, but Thomson's or Byron's; not Bruar-water itself, but Burns' picture of it; Scott's Trossachs, not the beautiful place itself; and hence, often when they try to describe such scenes, they merely dilute the descriptions of others and produce shadows of shades.

[14] In later life he was minister of the United Presbyterian Church on South Lindsay Street and was living at 5 Paradise Road, north of the city centre.

[15] Gilfillan died after a very short illness on 13 August 1878 at the house of a Mr Valentine in Brechin, having travelled to that town to officiate at the wedding of a niece.