The Divorce subject continued to occupy Milton. His tract had been rapidly bought, and had caused a sensation. Through the cold winter of 1643-4, while the Parliament and the Assembly were busy, and the auxiliary Scottish army was expected, a good many people had leisure to read the strange production, or at least to look into it, and be properly shocked. It seems to have been about this time, for example, that James Howell, the letter-writer, came, upon a copy. Or rather the copy must have come upon him; for the poor man, now past fifty years of age, and ousted from his clerkship to the Privy Council, was in the Fleet Prison for debt, and dependent for his subsistence there on translations, dedications and poems to friends, and all sorts of literary odds and ends. [Footnote: Wood's Ath. III. 745, and Cunningham's London Article _Fleet Prison_.] In one of his rambling pieces, afterwards published in the form of Letters, mostly without dates, and addressed to friends from feigned places, he thus gives what I take to be his impression of Milton's tract when it first reached him in the Fleet: "But that opinion of a poor shallow-brained puppy, who, upon any cause of dissatisfaction, would have men to have a privilege to change their wives, or to repudiate them, deserves to be hissed at rather than confuted; for nothing can tend more to usher in all confusion and beggary throughout the world: therefore that wiseacre deserves," &c. [Footnote: Howell's Familiar Letters Book IV, Letter 7, addressed "To Sir Edward Spencer, knight," (pp 453-457 of edit. 1754.) The letter is dated "Lond. 24 Jan.," no year given; but the dates are worthless, being afterthoughts, when the Letters were published in successive batches.] As Mr. Howell's own notions about marriage and its moralities were of the lightest and easiest, his severe virtuousness here is peculiarly representative. More interesting on its own account is the opinion of another contemporary--no other than Milton's late antagonist Bishop Hall. In Hall's _Cases of Conscience_ (not published till 1649) he thus describes the impression which Milton's Divorce pamphlet had made upon him when he first read it in its anonymous form: "I have heard too much of, and once saw, a licentious pamphlet, thrown abroad in these lawless times in the defence and encouragement of Divorces (not to be sued out; that solemnity needed not; but) to be arbitrarily given by the disliking husband to the displeasing and unquiet wife, upon this ground principally, That marriage was instituted for the help and comfort of man: where, therefore, the match proves such as that the wife doth but pull down aside, and, by her innate peevishness and either sullen or pettish and froward disposition, bring rather discontent to her husband, the end of marriage being hereby frustrate, why should it not, saith he, be in the husband's power, after some unprevailing means of reclamation attempted, to procure his own peace by casting off this