And at a Change, ne’r came too late.... 
  Our State-Artificer foresaw,
  Which way the World began to draw:... 
  He therefore wisely cast about,
  All ways he could, t’insure his Throat;
  And hither came t’observe, and smoke
  What Courses other Riscers took: 
  And to the utmost do his Best
  To Save himself, and Hang the Rest.

(Canto II, ll. 351-420).

Dryden’s satire should be compared with Butler’s.  But a comparison with the prose character by Burnet, which had no immediate political purpose, will reveal even better Dryden’s mastery in satirical portraiture.  Another verse character is in The Review by Richard Duke, written shortly after Dryden’s poem.

Absalom is Monmouth, David Charles II, Israel England, the Jews the English, and a Jebusite a Romanist.

Page 232, l. 28.  Compare Seneca, De Tranquillitate Animi, xvii. 10:  ‘nullum magnum ingenium sine mixtura dementiae fuit.’

Page 233, l. 7.  The humorous definition of man ascribed to Plato in Diogenes Laertius, Lib. vi. 40 (Life of Diogenes), [Greek:  Platonos horisamenou, anthropos esti zoon dipoun apteron.]

The son was a handsomer man than the father, though he did not inherit his ability.  His son, the third earl, was the critic and philosopher who wrote the Characteristicks.

l. 12. the Triple Bond, the alliance of England, Holland, and Sweden against France in 1667, broken by the war with France against Holland in 1672.  But Shaftesbury then knew nothing of the secret Treaty of Dover, 1670.

l. 16. Usurp’d, in ed. 1 ‘Assum’d’.

l. 25. Abbethdin ‘the president of the Jewish judicature’, ’the father of the house of judgement’.  Shaftesbury was Lord Chancellor, 1672-3.

Page 234, l. 4.  David would have sung his praises instead of writing a psalm, and so Heaven would have had one psalm the less.

ll. 5, 6.  Macaulay pointed out in his essay on Sir William Temple that these lines are a reminiscence of a couplet under the portrait of Sultan Mustapha the First in Knolles’s Historie of the Turkes (ed. 1638, p. 1370): 

  Greatnesse, on Goodnesse loues to slide, not stand,
  and leaues for Fortunes ice, Vertues firm land.

l. 15.  The alleged Popish Plot, invented by Titus Oates, to murder the king and put the government in the hands of the Jesuits.  Shaftesbury had no share in the invention, but he believed it, and made political use of it.

Page 235, l. 4.  This line reappears in The Hind and the Panther, Part I, l. 211.  As W.D.  Christie pointed out, it is a reminiscence of a couplet in Lachrymae Musarum, 1649, the volume to which Dryden contributed his school-boy verses ’Upon the Death of the Lord Hastings’: 

  It is decreed, we must be drain’d (I see)
  Down to the dregs of a Democracie.