ABSTRACT
In the eyes of the temperamental critic and the political enemy, if not in their own, the Levellers were Utopians and, even worse, revolutionaries. "Truly Lord General's intended government of this commonwealth for the future," a Cromwellian observer noted, "and John Lilburne's turbulent restless spirit, seem to be altogether incompatible". How wrong John Dryden had been when he thought that the subversion of governments would have no need of poets or historians: Thomas Shadwell versified the revolution in accents which, at other times and in Dryden's other moods, might well have been congenial. The beginnings of the classic European ideologies of revolution and reform were, then, accompanied by an efflorescence of image and idea, metaphor and didactic analogy, which through all the subsequent epochs of social and economic transformation was never to subside. Dryden's language evinces a significant ideological lag.
