He was pleased with it, and had the goodness to make in it some improvements.

Diderot, younger than these, was much about my own age.

He was fond of music, and knew it theoretically; we conversed together, and he communicated to me some of his literary projects.

This soon formed betwixt us a more intimate connection, which lasted fifteen years, and which probably would still exist were not I, unfortunately, and by his own fault, of the same profession with himself.
It would be impossible to imagine in what manner I employed this short and precious interval which still remained to me, before circumstances forced me to beg my bread:--in learning by memory passages from the poets which I had learned and forgotten a hundred times.

Every morning at ten o'clock, I went to walk in the Luxembourg with a Virgil and a Rousseau in my pocket, and there, until the hour of dinner, I passed away the time in restoring to my memory a sacred ode or a bucolic, without being discouraged by forgetting, by the study of the morning, what I had learned the evening before.