But when to mischief mortals bend their will,
How soon they find fit instruments of ill!

These lines come from Alexander Pope’s mock-epic poem *The Rape of the Lock* (1712; revised and expanded 1714), written to satirize and defuse a real social quarrel between two prominent Catholic families after Lord Petre cut a lock of Arabella Fermor’s hair. Pope frames fashionable “high society” trivialities in the elevated language and machinery of epic poetry. The couplet occurs as the poem turns from playful description to the chain of petty motives and actions that lead to the central “mischief” (the taking of the lock), underscoring how easily vanity and spite recruit helpers and circumstances.

Pope’s couplet crystallizes a cynical moral observation: once people decide on wrongdoing, they quickly discover—or create—the means to carry it out. “Instruments of ill” can be literal accomplices, convenient tools, or the social mechanisms (gossip, flattery, rivalry) that enable harm. In *The Rape of the Lock*, the “mischief” is comic and comparatively harmless, yet Pope treats it with mock-heroic gravity to expose how readily human will, when bent toward vanity or malice, rationalizes itself and marshals resources. The lines generalize beyond the poem’s drawing-room incident into a broader comment on moral choice and complicity.