"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."
Here ends the second part, or middle of the poem, in which we see the character and exploits of the hero portrayed with the hand of a master.
Nothing now remains to be examined but the third part, or end. In the end it is a rule pretty well established that the work should draw towards a conclusion, which our author manages thus:—