Note 5 — JANUARY AND MAY:
Reading edition
In the original the merchant is quoting an invective against wives from the Liber Aureolus of Theophrastus, who had long been dead. Hence the narrator calls down a curse upon his bones in the name of the advocates of matrimony:
This entent and an hundred sithe worse Writeth this man; there God his bones curse.
"Sithe" signifies "times." Pope has generalised the imprecation, and extended it to all bards, living or deceased, whereby the fitness of invoking a curse upon their bones is destroyed.