One was the Charles Buller engagement. Carlyle’s dating of this very important event in his life is rather hazy. In his _Reminiscences_ he gives us to understand that, after his parting with Irving at the Black Bull in Edinburgh, just before the Christmas of 1821, he lost sight of Irving altogether for a while, and was chagrined by Irving’s silence. He thought their correspondence had come to an end; accounted for the fact as well as he could by remembering in what a turmoil of new occupation Irving was then involved in London; and only came to know how faithful his friend had been to him all the while when the Buller tutorship at £200 a year emerged, “in the spring and summer of 1822,” as the product of Irving’s London exertions in his behalf. In reading this account, one fancies Irving already established in London, In fact, however, as Mrs. Oliphant’s _Life of Irving_ makes clear, Irving’s journey from the Black Bull to London in December 1821 had been on a trial visit only. He was back in Glasgow early in February 1822,—whence, on the 9th of that month, he wrote a long letter to his “dear and lovely pupil,” Miss Jane Welsh, sending it under cover to his friend “T. C.” in Edinburgh, because he was not sure but _she_ might be then in Edinburgh too; and it was not till July 1822, and after some difficult negotiation, that Irving, ordained by his native Presbytery of Annan, took his farewell of Glasgow and the West of Scotland, and settled in London definitely. The good turn he had done Carlyle in the matter of the Buller tutorship must have been done, therefore, in his preliminary London visit of January 1822, within a month after his parting from Carlyle at the Black Bull, and before Carlyle’s cigars, if Irving had taken them with him, could have been smoked out. It must have been in those January weeks of his probationary preachings before the Hatton Garden people that Irving, moving about as a new Scottish lion in the drawing-room of the English Stracheys of the India House, was introduced to Mrs. Strachey’s sister, Mrs. Buller, and, after some meetings with that lady, helped her in a “domestic intricacy.” This was that her eldest son, Charles Buller, a very clever and high-spirited boy, of about fifteen years of age, “fresh from Harrow,” but too young to go to Cambridge, was somewhat troublesome, and she and her husband were at a loss what to do with him. Irving’s advice had been to send the boy for a session or two to the University of Edinburgh, and to secure for him there the private tutorship of a certain young literary man, Mr. Thomas Carlyle, whom Irving knew thoroughly and could highly recommend. Mrs. Buller must have been a rapid lady, for the thing was arranged almost at once. Carlyle had been communicated with; and he had accepted the tutorship on the terms stipulated by Irving. It must have been on an early day in the spring of 1822 that he made that call at the house of the Rev. Dr.