Not only in the interest of morality, character, and manners did Locke disapprove the Public School system of his day. He also thought it essentially defective in its subjects and modes of instruction. The subjects taught were almost exclusively the Latin and Greek languages, though at Locke's own school of Westminster the upper forms were also initiated into Hebrew and Arabic. This linguistic training, though of course it included translations from the classical authors, was to a large extent carried on by means of verse-making, theme-making, repetition, and grammar lessons. Against all these modes of teaching Locke is peculiarly severe. Grammar, indeed, he would have taught, but not till the pupil is sufficiently conversant with the language to be able to speak it with tolerable fluency. Its proper place is as an introduction to Rhetoric. "I know not why any one should waste his time and beat his head about the Latin Grammar, who does not intend to be a critic, or make speeches and write despatches in it.... If his use of it be only to understand some books writ in it, without a critical knowledge of the tongue itself, reading alone will attain this end, without charging the mind with the multiplied rules and intricacies of Grammar." But without a knowledge of some rules of grammar, which need not, however, be taught in an abstract and separate form, but may be learnt gradually in the course of reading, writing, and speaking, how would it be possible to attain to any precise understanding of the authors read? The fault of the old system, which even still lingers on in school instruction, consisted not so much in teaching grammatical rules, as in teaching them apart from the writings which exemplify them, and which alone can render them intelligible or interesting to a beginner. The practice of filling up a large part of a boy's time with making Latin themes and verses meets with still more scathing censure than that of initiating him into the learned languages by means of abstract rules of grammar, and we may well imagine the cordial assent with which many of Locke's readers, smarting under a sense of the time they had in this way lost at school, would receive his criticisms.