[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 the same parents, and in revenge for what had been done to the Titans, conspired to dethrone Zeus. In order to scale heaven, they piled Mount Ossa upon Pelion, and would have succeeded in their attempt if Zeus had not called in the assistance of his son Hercules.] [Line 585: Appius.--He refers to Dennis (see note to verse 270) who had published a tragedy called _Appius and Virginia_. He retaliated for these remarks by coarse personalities upon Pope, in his criticism of this poem.] [Line 617: Durfey's Tales.--Thomas D'Urfey, the author (in the reign of Charles II.) of a sequel in five acts of _The Rehearsal_, a series of sonnets entitled _Pills to Purge Melancholy_, the Tales here alluded to, etc. He was a very inferior poet, although Addison pleaded for him.] [Line 619: Garth, Dr., afterwards Sir Samuel (born 1660) an eminent physician and a poet of considerable reputation He is best known as the author of _The Dispensary_, a poetical satire on the apothecaries and physicians who opposed the project of giving medicine gratuitously to the sick poor. The poet alludes to a slander current at the time with regard to the authorship of the poem.] [Line 623: St Paul's Churchyard, before the fire of London, was the headquarters of the booksellers.] [Lines 645, 646: See note on line 138.] [Line 648: The Maeonian star.--Homer, supposed by some to have been born in Maeonia, a part of Lydia in Asia Minor, and whose poems were the chief subject of Aristotle's criticism.] [Line 652: Who conquered nature--He wrote, besides his other works, treatises on Astronomy, Mechanics, Physics, and Natural History.] [Line 665: Dionysius, born at Halicarnassus about 50 B.C., was a learned critic, historian, and rhetorician at Rome in the Augustan age.] [Line 667: Petronius.--A Roman voluptuary at the court of Nero whose ambition was to shine as a court exquisite. He is generally supposed to be the author of certain fragments of a comic romance called _Petronii Arbitri Satyricon_.] [Line 669: Quintilian, born in Spain 40 A.D. was a celebrated teacher of rhetoric and oratory at Rome. His greatwork is _De Institutione Oratorica_, a complete system of rhetoric, which is here referred to.]