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.