ABSTRACT
The demands of the seventeenth-century reformers reeked—at least in the nostrils of the established guardians of the social order—of novelty, and of something ever worse, innovation. Recoiling, then, from the "horrible shape" of "hurlyburly innovation," from Howell's "novelty of revolution," the King belatedly tried to put the case for readjustment and reform. James Howell's indictment of the men who would reform everything, who would even "reform reformation itself," was the conventional one, set out in the stereotyped imagery of a limited political vocabulary. Flourishing the pragmatical superiority of the working politician for the political theorist, Clarendon suggested that Hobbes try to learn a few real things by turning from his "solitary cogitations" and taking a practical place in Parliament. There he could learn, slowly, like some mason's apprentice, to build with his hands; and people are back again to the language of homely similes.
