“In the early eighteenth century the microscope was just beginning to become popularized; ladies wore miniature microscopes on their wrists and amateur scientists . . . were frequently satirized in poems and plays. Both the simple act of looking through the microscope and its larger implications for use in research showed that to be miniaturized in the eighteenth century was not merely to be reduced. On the contrary, the miniature became magnified.”

—Cynthia Wall, from The Rape of the Lock, Alexander Pope , 1998, a wonderful anthology concerning the famous “heroi-comical” poem.