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certainly not into a life of serenity. The conversion was coincident
with Carlyle's submission to a new and very potent influence. In 1819 he
had begun to study German, with which he soon acquired a very remarkable
familiarity. Many of his contemporaries were awakening to the importance
of German thought, and Carlyle's knowledge enabled him before long to
take a conspicuous part in diffusing the new intellectual light. The
chief object of his reverence was Goethe. In many most important
respects no two men could be more unlike; but, for the present, Carlyle
seems to have seen in Goethe a proof that it was possible to reject
outworn dogmas without sinking into materialism. Goethe, by singularly
different methods, had emerged from a merely negative position into a
lofty and coherent conception of the universe. Meanwhile, Carlyle's
various anxieties were beginning to be complicated by physical
derangement. A rat, he declared, was gnawing at the pit of his stomach.
He was already suffering from the ailments, whatever their precise
nature, from which he never escaped. He gave vent to his irritability by
lamentations so grotesquely exaggerated as to make it difficult to
estimate the real extent of the evil.

Irving's friendship now became serviceable. Carlyle's confession of the
radical difference of religious opinion had not alienated his friend,
who was settling in London, and used his opportunities for promoting
Carlyle's interest. In January 1822 Carlyle, through Irving's
recommendation, became tutor to Charles and Arthur Buller, who were to
be students at Edinburgh. Carlyle's salary was L200 a year, and this,
with the proceeds of some literary work, enabled him at once to help his
brother John to study medicine and his brother Alexander to take up a
farm. Carlyle spent some time with the elder Bullers, but found a life
of dependence upon fashionable people humiliating and unsatisfactory. He
employed himself at intervals upon a life of Schiller and a translation
of _Wilhelm Meister_. He received L50 for a translation of Legendre's
_Geometry_; and an introduction, explaining the theory of proportion, is
said by De Morgan to show that he could have gained distinction as an
expounder of mathematical principles. He finally gave up his tutorship
in July 1824, and for a time tried to find employment in London. The
impressions made upon him by London men of letters were most
unfavourable. Carlyle felt by this time conscious o