Here, whoever has an ear for harmony, and a heart for feeling, must be touched! There is a desponding melancholy in the run of the last line! an air of tender regret in the addition of "quite away!" a something so expressive of irrecoverable loss! so forcibly intimating the "Ah nunquam reditura!" "They never can return!" in short, such an union of sound and sense, as we rarely, if ever meet with in any author, ancient or modern. 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
“Call’d 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 bye, 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
“Call’d for those Tarts,
“And beat the Knave full sore!”