Fleming in George Square, to receive his new pupil, Charles Buller, with
Charles’s younger brother Arthur, on their arrival in Edinburgh, and had
that first walk with them by the foot of Salisbury Crags, and up the
High Street from Holyrood, of which there is such pleasant mention in
the _Reminiscences_. Dr. Fleming, a fellow-contributor with Carlyle to
Brewster’s _Encyclopædia_, and a much respected clergyman of Edinburgh,
had interested himself greatly in Irving’s London prospects, and had
tried to smooth the way for him by letters to London friends; and it was
in his house in George Square that the two English boys were to
board,—Carlyle coming to them daily from his lodgings in Moray Street.
He had already, before the arrival of the boys, he tells us, entered
Charles Buller in Dunbar’s “third Greek class” in the University. The
information agrees with the University records; for in the
matriculation-book of the session 1821–22 I find one of the very latest
matriculations to have been that of “Charles Buller, Cornwall,” and I
find him to have been all but the last student enrolled for that session
in Dunbar’s senior class. This of itself would imply that Carlyle’s
tutorship of the boys must have begun in February 1822; for, as the
University session ends in the beginning of April, it would have hardly
been worth while to enroll the young Buller in a class after February.
The tutorship was a settled thing, therefore, while Irving was still in
Glasgow, and it had been going on for some months before Irving’s
permanent removal to London. Carlyle himself seems to have become aware
of the haziness of his dating of the transaction; for he inserts, by way
of afterthought, a dim recollection of one or two sights of Irving
somewhere shortly after the Black Bull parting, and of talks with him
about the Buller family while the tutorship was in its infancy. Anyhow,
the Buller tutorship, with its £200 a year, was “a most important thing”
to Carlyle in “the economies and practical departments” of his life at
the time; and he owed it “wholly to Irving.” The two boys, Charles
Buller especially, took to their new tutor cordially at once, and he
cordially to them; and there were no difficulties. In the classics,
indeed, and especially in Greek, Charles Buller, fresh from his Harrow
training, was Carlyle’s superior; but Carlyle could do his duty for both
the boys by getting up their Latin and Greek lessons along with them,
teaching them as much mathematics as they would learn, and guiding them
generally into solid reading, inquiry, and reflection.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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