Later seventeenth-century satire was an incoherent setting of diamonds and coal. Poets of genius, or less, often lacked design, full awareness of the limits of their art, and modulation of tone. Butler's endless Hudibrastics stretch a joke until it breaks; Rochester's “Allusion to Horace” (1680) is written by a brilliant self-destructive solipsist often too intent on savaging his apparent inferiors than convincing us that they are inferiors worth savaging; Robert Gould, and even the more promising John Oldham, are best when shouting with graveled voices. The significant exception to this expandable list of course is John Dryden.

Whether through native gift, experience with dramatic dialogue, breadth of classical and modern reading, or all of the above, Dryden could give satire shape, variety, and appealing public urgency for private concerns. Both in the largely punitive Mac Flecknoe (1682, 1684) and the corrective heroic satire Absalom and Achitophel (1681), Dryden offers unity of plot, diversity of voice, and community of response between satirist and audience, and at times even between the satirist and the satirized: he teaches the once-profligate David-Charles II to adopt the values of the narrator-Dryden. In Dryden's hands, satire is purged of some of its energetic vulgarity – as evident in peer as in plebeian – and acquires good manners that can easily be rejected when “please” fails.