“It is like looking through a microscope, where every thing assumes a new character and a new consequence, where things are seen in their minutest circumstances and slightest shades of difference; where the little becomes gigantic, the deformed beautiful, and the beautiful deformed.”

—William Hazlitt, commenting on what I call the “trippiness” of the Rape in 1818. Found in The Rape of the Lock, Alexander Pope, edited by Cynthia Wall, 1998.