ABSTRACT
Revolution in the seventeenth century rarely went under its own name; and when it did, it suggested, at least in England, regress rather than progress, a restoration, a "turning backe to its first place." It is perhaps a sign of the genius of the English language and character that revolution, even at a time of violence and rebellion, should have gone by the name of reform. Revolution was born in metaphor, and the literary marks of its birth have been ineradicable. Indeed, its whole political evolution as one of mankind's archetypal concepts and mythological symbols has, through changing circumstances over turbulent centuries, been dominated by what people may think of as a metaphorical imperative. English writers may well have been peculiarly slow to adapt to a political vocabulary which for at least two centuries had marked the pages of various Italian chroniclers of rebels and their insurrectionary efforts.
