What are some reasons that satire became popular in the age of John Dryden and Alexander Pope?

Satire, it can be argued, became an especially popular
genre in English poetry during the age of John Dryden and Alexander Pope for a number of
reasons.  Among those reasons are the
following:

• The growth of political partisanship,
  especially developing tensions between “Whigs” and “Tories.” A hundred years earlier,
  during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, factions had existed at the royal court, but the
  rise of formal political factions or “parties” as such was still in the future.  Satire
  was a means by which political factions in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth
  centuries could express their opposition to one
  another.


• The growth of religious divisions, particularly
  between Protestants and Catholics and within Protestantism.  Again, satire was a kind of
  writing especially appropriate to the expression of religious
  conflict.


• The rise of rationalism (an emphasis on
  “Reason”), which was now increasingly seen as an alternative to religion and which soon
  had its own advocates and detractors.


• The rise of
  professional writers – authors who earned their livings by writing poetry, often of a
  satirical kind. Satire was lively, controversial, and topical and thus had plenty of
  readers.  The “market” for satire during this period was a healthy
  one.


• The rise of the power of parliament and of the
  middle classes.  Whereas under Queen Elizabeth the monarch and the aristocracy were the
  most powerful persons in the land, after 1660 power became more dispersed, conflicts
  among the powerful became more open, and the need to win allies and attack enemies by
  using the popular press had become more urgent.


• The
  controversies associated with the Civil War had schooled many English writers in the
  arts of satirical prose, especially in the form of satirical pamphlets. During the age
  of Dryden and Pope, writers of satire were often poets influenced by classical Roman
  satirists, especially the poet Horace.


• A growing sense
  that the purpose of literature was to be explicitly didactic (that is, to teach lessons,
  especially moral lessons). Satire is a genre that lends itself to explicit instruction
  and persuasion.