First, there is the very large class of partisan judgments--judgments based, not upon a free appreciation, but upon some personal predilection or transient appeal. To this class belong the special preferences of boyhood and youth--the liking for Cooper and Jules Verne, for example-- and those due to nationality, like the Englishman's choice of Thackeray and the Frenchman's of Balzac, or, what is a more flagrant case, the long resistance of the French public to the beauty of Wagner's music. The former type of judgment is corrected by the simple process of maturing, when the beauties appreciated in youth are not lost, but only given their due place in the hierarchy of aesthetic values; the latter type, on the other hand, being more deeply based, is more difficult to remedy. But that even this prejudice can be largely overcome is shown by the example of critics who, through prolonged sympathetic study, come to prefer the art of a foreign land. A notable example of this is Meier-Graeffe, who condemns almost all of modern German painting and exalts the French. [Footnote: See his _Modern Art_, and his special studies of Manet, Renoir, and Degas.] Patriotic preferences are so difficult to overcome because they spring from limitations of sympathy. Sympathy depends upon acquaintance, and few of us can acquire the same expertness in an alien language or artistic form that we possess in our own. Yet, understanding the reason for these deficiencies of judgment, we can go to work to improve them, through increasing our knowledge of foreign art.