It was, say Pope's apologists, an awkward
circumstance that Tickell should publish at the same time as Pope, and
that is about all that they can say. It was, we may reply in
Stephenson's phrase, very awkward--for Tickell. In all this, in fact, it
seems impossible for any reasonable man to discover anything of which
Pope had the slightest ground of complaint; but his amazingly irritable
nature was not to be calmed by reason. The bare fact that a translation
of Homer appeared contemporaneously with his own, and that it came from
one of Addison's court, made him furious. He brooded over it, suspected
some dark conspiracy against his fame, and gradually mistook his morbid
fancies for solid inference. He thought that Tickell had been put up by
Addison as his rival, and gradually worked himself into the further
belief that Addison himself had actually written the translation which
passed under Tickell's name. It does not appear, so far as I know, when
or how this suspicion became current. Some time after Addison's death,
in 1719, a quarrel took place between Tickell, his literary executor,
and Steele. Tickell seemed to insinuate that Steele had not sufficiently
acknowledged his obligations to Addison, and Steele, in an angry retort,
called Tickell the "reputed translator" of the first Iliad, and
challenged him to translate another book successfully. The innuendo
shows that Steele, who certainly had some means of knowing, was willing
to suppose that Tickell had been helped by Addison.
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