And I apprehend, my Lord Shaftesbury’s opinion of mere burlesque agrees with mine, when he asserts, “There is no such thing to be found in the writings of the antients.”  But perhaps I have less abhorrence than he professes for it:  and that not because I have had some little success on the stage this way; but rather as it contributes more to exquisite mirth and laughter than any other; and these are probably more wholesome physic for the mind, and conduce better to purge away spleen, melancholy, and ill affections, than is generally imagined.  Nay, I will appeal to common observation, whether the same companies are not found more full of good-humour and benevolence, after they have been sweetened for two or three hours with entertainments of this kind, than soured by a tragedy or a grave lecture.

But to illustrate all this by another science, in which, perhaps, we shall see the distinction more clearly and plainly:  let us examine the works of a comic history-painter, with those performances which the Italians call Caricatura, where we shall find the greatest excellence of the former to consist in the exactest copy of nature, insomuch, that a judicious eye instantly rejects anything outre, any liberty which the painter hath taken with the features of that alma mater.  Whereas in the Caricatura we allow all licence.  Its aim is to exhibit monsters, not men, and all distortions and exaggerations whatever are within its proper province.

Now what Caricatura is in painting Burlesque is in writing, and in the same manner the comic writer and painter correlate to each other.  And here I shall observe, that as in the former, the painter seems to have the advantage, so it is in the latter infinitely on the side of the writer, for the Monstrous is much easier to paint than describe, and the Ridiculous to describe than paint.

And tho’ perhaps this latter species doth not in either science so strongly affect and agitate the muscles as the other, yet it will be owned I believe, that a more rational and useful pleasure arises to us from it.  He who should call the ingenious Hogarth a burlesque painter, would, in my opinion, do him very little honour:  for sure it is much easier, much less the subject of admiration, to paint a man with a nose, or any other feature of a preposterous size, or to expose him in some absurd or monstrous attitude, than to express the affections of men on canvas.  It hath been thought a vast commendation of a painter to say his figures seem to breathe, but surely it is a much greater and nobler applause, that they appear to think.