But he did better. Howell is not the only writer who has tried to bind up the wounds of a broken heart by authorship; or has succeeded in dissipating the hours of a long imprisonment by communicating not only with the world of letters, which was nearly extinct in general literature during the first year of the Protectorate, but with those among the free, the sympathetic, and the celebrated who remembered the poor debtor in his cell. One of his most notable efforts was his own epitaph, beginning-- “Here lies entomb’d a walking thing, Whom Fortune with the Fates did fling Between these walls.” He wrote now his “Familiar Letters, Domestic and Foreign,” wisely putting no date on the epistles as to place. He composed also "Casual Discourses and Interlocutions between Patricius and Peregrin, touching the Distractions of the Times"--this work was the result of the Battle of Edge Hill--“Parables reflecting on the Times;” "England’s Tears for the Present War;" “Vindications of some Passages reflecting upon himself in Mr. Prynne’s book called the ‘Popish Royal Favourite,’” a work which coupled his name with that of Buckingham; and his “Epistolæ-Hoelianæ.” These works came out year after year. It is said by Wood that most of Howell’s letters were written in the Fleet, though some of them purported to have been sent from Madrid and other places. The fact is, he wrote for subsistence; and his works were popular and productive. His statements may, indeed, have been made so long after the events they relate occurred, as to render them doubtful; yet it is acknowledged that they contain a good view of the actors in those stirring times--whilst they are almost the only letters that still preserve the memory of the writer among us.