Note 194 — APPENDIX,
Reading edition
What caricature is in painting, burlesque is in writing; and in the same manner the comic writer and painter correlate to each other. But 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 though 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 monstrous size, or to expose him in some absurd or monstrous attitude, than to express the affections of men on canvas. It has 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."
This is Fielding's opinion, and the fiat of such a writer ought to have great weight; for his characters and Hogarth's pictures are drawn from the same source.