s confidence, and hopes that it will not be abused; he challenges
Addison to point out the ill nature in the _Essay upon Criticism_; and
winds up by making an utterly irrelevant charge (as a proof, he says, of
his own sincerity) of plagiarism against one of Addison's _Spectators_.
Had such a letter been actually sent as it now stands, Addison's good
nature could scarcely have held out. As it is, we can only assume that
during 1714 Pope was on such terms with the clique at Button's, that a
quarrel would be a natural result. According to the ordinary account the
occasion presented itself in the next year.

A translation of the first Iliad by Tickell appeared (in June, 1715)
simultaneously with Pope's first volume. Pope had no right to complain.
No man could be supposed to have a monopoly in the translation of Homer.
Tickell had the same right to try his hand as Pope; and Pope fully
understood this himself. He described to Spence a conversation in which
Addison told him of Tickell's intended work. Pope replied that Tickell
was perfectly justified. Addison having looked over Tickell's
translation of the first book, said that he would prefer not to see
Pope's, as it might suggest double dealing; but consented to read Pope's
second book, and praised it warmly. In all this, by Pope's own showing,
Addison seems to have been scrupulously fair; and if he and the little
senate preferred Tickell's work on its first appearance, they had a full
right to their opinion, and Pope triumphed easily enough to pardon them.
"He was meditating a criticism upon Tickell," says Johnson, "when his
adversary sank before him without a blow." Pope's performance was
universally preferred, and even Tickell himself yielded by anticipation.
He said, in a short preface, that he had abandoned a plan of translating
the whole Iliad on finding that a much abler hand had undertaken the
work, and that he only published this specimen to bespeak favour for a
translation of the Odyssey. 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 contemp