attacked the dramatists of the time generally and Dryden individually,
and is the Quack Maurus of Dryden's prologue to _The Secular
Masque_. Millbourn, Rev. Luke, who criticised Dryden; which
criticism, although sneered at by Pope, is allowed to have been judicious
and decisive.]

[Line 465: Zoilus. See note on line 183.]

[Line 479: Patriarch wits--Perhaps an allusion to the great
age to which the antediluvian patriarchs of the Bible lived.]

[Line 536: An easy monarch.--Charles II.]

[Line 541: At that time ladies went to the theater in masks.]

[Line 544: A foreign reign.--The reign of the foreigner,
William III.]

[Line 545: Socinus.--The reaction from the fanaticism of the
Puritans, who held extreme notions of free grace and satisfaction, by
resolving all Christianity into morality, led the way to the
introduction of Socinianism, the most prominent feature of which is the
denial of the existence of the Trinity.]

[Line 552: Wit's Titans.--The Titans, in Greek mythology,
were the children of Uranus (heaven) and Gaea (earth), and of gigantic
size. They engaged in a conflict with Zeus, the king of heaven, which
lasted ten years. They were completely defeated, and hurled down into a
dungeon below Tartarus. Very often they are confounded with the Giants,
as has apparently been done here by Pope. These were a later progeny of