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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Wrecker by Stevenson & Osbourne: gallantry, knee breeches, and dry and pregnant sayings. He,
looking on the long meals and waxing bellies of the French,
whom I confess I somewhat imitated, branded me as "a
cultivator of restaurant fat." And I believe he had his finger on
the dangerous spot; I believe, if things had gone smooth with
me, I should be now swollen like a prize-ox in body, and fallen
in mind to a thing perhaps as low as many types of bourgeois
--the implicit or exclusive artist. That was a home word of
Pinkerton's, deserving to be writ in letters of gold on the portico
of every school of art: "What I can't see is why you should
want to do nothing else." The dull man is made, not by the
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