...rowth, earth, birth, truth, and other words of this kind? Horne Tooke made a better guess than this. If Mr. Masson be right in supposing that a peculiar meaning is implied in the spelling bearth ( Paradise Lost , IX. 624), which he interprets as collective produce, though in the only other instance where it occurs it is neither more nor less than birth, it should seem that Milton had hit upon Horne Tooke's e...