“I think that honour has a more noble and favour a more obliging look than honor and favor. Honor seems to me to do just his duty and nothing more; favor to qualify his kind deed with an air of coldness. Odor, again, may be a fit term for a chemical distillation; but a whole May garden comes before me in the word odour.”
The lover of the classics must always feel a sense of regret that Cicero and Virgil and Horace were denied by the spelling prevailing in their tongue the opportunity of enjoying this May garden, so cheaply secured for this sentimental Englishman by spelling odor with a u. It is always unfortunate when the sense of largeness of soul can only be developed at the expense of intellect. Fanciful notions like the one just cited can never be dispelled by argument, as reason plays no part in bringing them into being. As to association alone they owe their creation, so to association alone will they owe their destruction.
FOOTNOTES:
[27] Line 850.
[28] Line 1825.
[29] Sonnets 91 and 92.
[30] Venus and Adonis, lines 969, 976; The Rape of Lucrece, 1099, 1290, 1380, 1506; in line 586 it is labor.
[31] In the original edition of The Rape of Lucrece, honor is found in lines 45, 142, 146, 156, 574, 579, 834, 841, 842, 1031, 1032, 1184, 1186, 1190, 1201, 1608, and 1705; honour is found in lines 27, 145, and 516. In Venus and Adonis the word occurs in lines 558 and 994, both times as honor.
[32] Letters of David Hume to William Strahan, Oxford, 1888, p. 27.
[33] Burton’s Life and Correspondence of David Hume, Edinburgh, 1846, vol. ii, p. 43. Burton changed Hume’s spellings to conform to modern orthography.