3rd. "Little sins make way for great, and one brings in all."
JOHN BRANFILL HARRISON.
Maidstone.
"A BREATH CAN MAKE THEM AS A BREATH HAS MADE."
(Vol. iv., p. 482.)
With reference to the observations of HENRY H. BREEN upon a well-known passage in Goldsmith's Deserted Village, a little consideration will convince him that the view taken by D'Israeli and himself is not only extremely superficial, but that the proposed emendation would entirely destroy the poet's meaning.
The antithesis is not between flourishing and fading, but between the difficult restoration of a bold peasantry and the easy reproduction of princes and lords.
The first branch of the antithesis is between wealth and men:
"Where wealth accumulates and men decay."
It then proceeds to set forth that it matters little whether nobles flourish or fade, because a breath can make them as easily as it has originally made them: but not so with a bold peasantry. When once they are destroyed, they can never be replaced.
In fact, so far from the sense requiring the alteration of "makes" into "unmakes," the substitution, if we would preserve the author's meaning, should be "remakes:"