The old canon law, which insisted on the indissolubility of true marriages, and, even in cases of adultery, afforded no larger divorce than the separation from board and bed, having been revived at the close of Elizabeth’s reign, our ancestors lived for several generations under a matrimonial law of unprecedented rigour and narrowness, that in its results demonstrated the sagacity and prudence of Edward the Sixth’s Commissioners. Had the Commissioners’ proposals become law, England would have escaped much of the profligacy that, after rendering her seventeenth century proverbial for domestic libertinism, was less remarkable in the eighteenth century, only because the usage of successive ages had rendered society comparatively indifferent to it. Whilst no student of our social history can question that throughout those centuries the English home suffered severely from the excessive stringency of the matrimonial law, every student of literature is cognizant of the stream of written protests against the harshness and unyielding rigour of that law, from Elizabeth to Victoria. That Milton shocked the lighter people of his time by his assaults on the limitations of liberty of divorce is not to be conceived. That he did not by his writings against those restrictions offend the more precise and God-fearing of his contemporaries, appears from the regard in which they held him as a religious poet, after his descent to darkness and evil days. So far as concerns freedom of divorce, the Free Contract party of William Godwin’s epoch required nothing that Milton would not have granted, and urged little that Bucer would have hesitated to approve.