minnikin

But he called the minnikin grass-plot his meadow, and talked very largely about mowing his hay.

Isaac T. Hopper Lydia Maria Francis Child 1841

Affluence, Ciliegia Grande and Kirschie Real, the two chirsines, with respecks from his missus, seepy and sewery, and a request might she passe of him for a minnikin.

Finnegans Wake 2006

I question if the little filigree sugar-tongs, made something like scissors, could have opened themselves wide enough to take up an honest, vulgar good-sized piece; and when I tried to seize two little minnikin pieces at once, so as not to be detected in too many returns to the sugar-basin, they absolutely dropped one, with a little sharp clatter, quite in a malicious and unnatural manner.

Cranford Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell 1837

For though I am such a minnikin lion now, and so old, literally without teeth or claws, still there be, that might rattle at the grate to make me get up and come out, and stand up to play tricks for them, and this I am not able or inclined to do.

The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Volume 2 Maria Edgeworth 1808

Minor wits have delighted in clubbing their small but poisoned missiles, and in aiming flights of minnikin arrows at the Gullivers of their different periods.

The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Volume 1 With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes John Dryden 1665