So much for Latin.

In Greek he made far less progress.

He had attained his nineteenth year before he learned the alphabet, and even after so late a beginning he did not prosecute the study with much energy.
M.Pavillard seems to have taught him little more than the rudiments.
"After my tutor had left me to myself I worked my way through about half the _Iliad_, and afterwards interpreted alone a large portion of Xenophon and Herodotus.

But my ardour, destitute of aid and emulation, gradually cooled, and from the barren task of searching words in a lexicon I withdrew to the free and familiar conversation of Virgil and Tacitus." This statement of the Memoirs is more than confirmed by the journal of his studies, where we find him, as late as the year 1762, when he was twenty-five years of age, painfully reading Homer, it would appear, for the first time.

He read on an average about a book a week, and when he had finished the _Iliad_ this is what he says: "I have so far met with the success I hoped for, that I have acquired a great facility in reading the language, and treasured up a very great stock of words.