Our feelings are all alive, but the poet, wisely dreading
that our sympathy with the injured Queen might alienate our affections
from his hero, contrives immediately to awaken our fears for him by
telling us that--
"The King of Hearts
Called for those tarts".
We are all conscious of the fault of our hero, and all tremble with
him, for the punishment which the enraged monarch may inflict:
"And beat the Knave full sore!"
The fatal blow is struck! We cannot but rejoice that guilt is justly
punished, though we sympathize with the guilty object of punishment.
Here Scriblerus, who, by the by, is very fond of making unnecessary
alterations, proposes reading "score" instead of "sore", meaning
thereby to particularize that the beating bestowed by this monarch
consisted of twenty stripes. But this proceeds from his ignorance of
the genius of our language, which does not admit of such an expression
as "full score", but would require the insertion of the particle "a",
which cannot be, on account of the metre. And this is another great
artifice of the poet. By leaving the quantity of beating indeterminate,
he gives every reader the liberty to administer it, in exact proportion
to the sum of indignation which he may have conceived against his hero,
that by thus amply satisfying their resentment they may be the more
easily reconciled to him afterwards.
"The King of Hearts
Called for those tarts,
And beat the Knave full sore.
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