Nothing to add to the Twickenham _Pope_, VI, 179-180.
Five minor roles differ from 1717, as stated above. _Mrs. Bicknet._ A misreading by the typesetter--he had never heard of Mrs. Bicknell.
140 _Almost three and twenty._ Mrs. Oldfield was only 34 in 1717 but no doubt popular enough to draw a laugh by simpering at this line.
_The office of the church ... brute beasts._ The _Book of Common Prayer_ (1709) says of matrimony that it is not to be taken in hand "wantonly ... like brute beasts." The fashion of alluding to the Prayer Book in a jocose context, if it did not begin in the reign of Charles II, was at least in vogue than; a couple of instances in Dryden's _Wild Gallant_ will be pointed out in the Clark _Dryden_, VIII (scheduled to appear in 1962). Another touch of "profaneness" that Collieresque critics objected to in _Three Hours_ was the paraphrase of Holy Writ in Sir Tremendous's line about "ten righteous criticks," p. 153; cf. Key, p. 215.
141 _pistachoe-porridge._ An aphrodisiac concoction? (I apologize for my neglect of the pharmaceutical, medical, and alchemical jargon--J.H.S.)
144 _spoils of quarries._ Cf. the anecdote of Dr. Woodward in the Key, p. 211; Parker's Key has it also, but in a less complete form.
145 _Shock._ Mrs. Townley's lapdog--perhaps named after Belinda's in _Rape of the Lock_. Of course it may have been a common name for such dogs before Pope wrote the poem; see Twickenham _Pope_, II, 153.
147 _my pace and my honour._ 1717, "Peace."
148 _forgive thee, if thou hadst ... kill'd my lapdog._ Parker, with a citation to _Rape of the Lock_, assigned this speech to Pope, and indeed it smacks of several places in the poem, e.g., III, 157-8, IV, 119-120.
150 _some ... that nauseate the smell of a rose._ Cf. _Essay on Man_, I, 200.
152 _That injudicious Canaille._ In view of her bias Phoebe's strictures on the players are of course to be taken in the directly opposite sense.
155 Parker finds some double-entendres in the dialogue in which Phoebe and Sir Tremendous compliment each other; if such there be, the speakers are unaware of them.
156 _if stones were dissolved, as a late philosopher hath proved._ In summarizing his thesis in the preface to his Essay _Toward a Natural History of the Earth_ (1695) Dr. Woodward does say that "the whole Terrestrial Globe was taken all to pieces and dissolved at the Deluge, the particles of Stone ..." According to the DNB, Arbuthnot published a criticism of this book in 1697.