r to the two sons of a wealthy lady, Mrs Charles Buller, at a salary
of L200 a year. It was through Irving that this appointment came. The
young lads boarded with 'a good old Dr Fleming' in George Square,
whither Carlyle went daily from his lodgings at[5]3 Moray Street,
Pilrig Street. The Bullers finally returned to London, Carlyle staying
at his father's little homestead of Mainhill to finish a translation of
'Wilhelm Meister.' He followed the Bullers to London, where he resigned
the tutorship in the hope of getting some literary work.

Irving introduced him to the proprietor of the _London Magazine_, who
offered Carlyle sixteen guineas a sheet for a series of 'Portraits of
Men of Genius and Character.' The first was to be a life of Schiller,
which appeared in that periodical in 1823-4. Mr Boyd, the Edinburgh
publisher, accepted the translation of 'Wilhelm Meister.' 'Two years
before,' wrote Carlyle in his _Reminiscences_, 'I had at length, after
some repulsions, got into the heart of "Wilhelm Meister," and eagerly
read it through; my sally out, after finishing, along the vacant streets
of Edinburgh, (a windless, Scotch-misty Saturday night), is still vivid
to me. "Grand, surely, harmoniously built together, far-seeing, wise,
and true: when, for many years, or almost in my life before, have I read
such a book?"' A short letter from Goethe in Weimar, in acknowledgment
of a copy of his 'Wilhelm Meister,' was peculiarly gratifying to
Carlyle.

Carlyle was not happy in London; dyspepsia and 'the noises' sorely
troubled him. He was anxious to be gone. To the surprise of Irving--who
was now settled in the metropolis--and everybody else, he resolutely
decided to return to Annandale, where his father had leased for him a
compact little farm at Hoddam Hill, three miles from Mainhill, and
visible from the fields at the back of it. 'Perhaps it was the very day
before my departure,' wrote Carlyle, 'at least it is the last I
recollect of him [Irving], we were walking in the streets multifariously
discoursing; a dim grey day, but dry and airy;--at the corner of
Cockspur Street we paused for a moment, meeting Sir John Sinclair
("Statistical Account of Scotland" etc.), whom I had never seen before
and never saw again. A lean old man, tall but stooping, in tartan cloak,
face very wrinkly, nose blue, physiognomy vague and with distinction as
one might have expected it to be. He spoke to Irving with benignant
respect, whether to me at a