The overwhelming preponderance of rhetoric in ancient critical thought followed naturally from the dominance of rhetoric in education.[6] Formal schooling in poetic, what we now call primary instruction in literature, began with _grammaticus_,[7] and he was committed in advance to preparing his boys for their studies in rhetoric. With his task of inculcating correctness in reading, speaking, and writing were associated his lectures (_prælectiones_) on the poets. Though these may often, given the highly selected group of students, have done much for appreciation of literature, they can hardly have ranged far in poetic. _Grammaticus_ probably confined himself in most cases to what is known in French schools as _explication des textes_. Within its limits this is admirable; but given the age of the pupils and their specific object, it cannot often have gone beyond words and sentences into the poetic composition of the whole. Criticism _ad hoc_, the detailed study of a particular poem passage by passage, is a method not only necessary for schooling, but valuable more widely. By sheer prevalence it must always be influential; illumination must in fact have come oftener from such interpretation than from a systematic treatise on poetry. None the less it needs more correction and extension from other forms of criticism than was usually possible in the ancient world. By itself it tends toward a pedestrian analysis of diction and toward emphasis on those aspects of poetic which are available for rhetoric. Criticism by labels, the classifying of authors by accepted adjectives, is not, unfortunately, confined either to antiquity or to grammarians. A certain amount of criticism, apparently, must always be devoted to telling people what they ought to say. But the classifying habit seems to have been especially prevalent in ancient criticism. At any rate, the labels affixed by grammarians were widely repeated. Even so discerning a critic as Quintilian thus makes his tenth book a convenient “survey.” The satisfaction of an audience in neat and recognizable characterization is given by Apuleius. “Any speech composed by Avitus will be found everywhere so consistently perfect that Cato would not miss in it his dignity, nor Laelius his smoothness, nor Gracchus his vehemence, nor Cæsar his warmth, nor Hortensius his clear plan, nor Calvus his subtleties, nor Sallust his conciseness, nor Cicero his richness.” Apuleius, _Apologia_. Each orator has the right label, as in a cram-book; and the same classifying neatness disposes of the poetic of Philemon.