_After the plaster cast by J. Devile_ Collection of Augustin Rischgitz] strong and even humble curiosity which does really know something about foreign nations, but along with it that strange tendency to put the true thing the wrong way round, to seize on the unimportant side of the matter first. It is just as if a foreign critic of England, instead of knowing nothing at all about us, as is usually the case--were to grasp the fact that the most luxurious English people went fox-hunting, and then explain it by saying that these Sybarites had one weird hatred, a venomous hatred of foxes. Such a man would have got the facts right and the truth wrong; and such is our constant national condition with regard to foreign ideas. But there is an even more curious example of it than this, and that is the fact that even in our own discussions, and in the matter of the great reputations of our own country, we [Illustration: THACKERAY AT THE AGE OF THREE, with his Father and Mother, Mr. and Mrs. Richmond Thackeray _From a water-colour sketch done in India by Chinnery in 1814, now in the possession of Mrs. Richmond Ritchie_ (Reproduced from the Biographical Edition of Thackeray’s Works, by kind permission of Messrs. Smith, Elder & Co.)] exhibit this same singular tendency to catch hold of truth only by the tail or the hind leg. Our judgments--that is, our current and conventional judgments--on our great men of genius have a singular disposition to begin in enormous letters with the unimportant defect, and miss in comparison the great merit out of which that defect [Illustration: THACKERAY AMONG THE FRASERIANS _Drawn by Daniel Maclise, 1835_]