Many of his sentiments on religious subjects are worthy of a liberal and enlarged mind.  He could discern clearly enough the folly and meanness of all bigotry except his own.  When he spoke of the scruples of the Puritans, he spoke like a person who had really obtained an insight into the divine philosophy of the New Testament, and who considered Christianity as a noble scheme of government, tending to promote the happiness and to elevate the moral nature of man.  The horror which the sectaries felt for cards, Christmas ale, plum-porridge, mince-pies, and dancing bears excited his contempt.  To the arguments urged by some very worthy people against showy dress he replied with admirable sense and spirit, “Let us not be found, when our Master calls us, stripping the lace off our waistcoats, but the spirit of contention from our souls and tongues.  Alas! sir, a man who cannot get to heaven in a green coat will not find his way thither the sooner in a grey one.”  Yet he was himself under the tyranny of scruples as unreasonable as those of Hudibras or Ralpho, and carried his zeal for ceremonies and for ecclesiastical dignities to lengths altogether inconsistent with reason or with Christian charity.  He has gravely noted down in his diary that he once committed the sin of drinking coffee on Good Friday.  In Scotland, he thought it was his duty to pass several months without joining in public worship, solely because the ministers of the kirk had not been ordained by bishops.  His mode of estimating the piety of his neighbours was somewhat singular.  “Campbell,” said he, “is a good man, a pious man.  I am afraid he has not been in the inside of a church for many years, but he never passes a church without pulling off his hat:  this shows he has good principles.”  Spain and Sicily must surely contain many pious robbers and well-principled assassins.  Johnson could easily see that a Roundhead who named all his children after Solomon’s singers, and talked in the House of Commons about seeking the Lord, might be an unprincipled villain whose religious mummeries only aggravated his guilt; but a man who took off his hat when he passed a church episcopally consecrated must be a good man, a pious man, a man of good principles.  Johnson could easily see that those persons who looked on a dance or a laced waistcoat as sinful deemed most ignobly of the attributes of God and of the ends of revelation; but with what a storm of invective he would have overwhelmed any man who had blamed him for celebrating the redemption of mankind with sugarless tea and butterless buns!...

Johnson, as Mr. Burke most justly observed, appears far greater in Boswell’s books than in his own.  His conversation appears to have been quite equal to his writings in matter, and far superior to them in manner.  When he talked, he clothed his wit and his sense in forcible and natural expressions.  As soon as he took his pen in his hand to write for the public, his style became systematically vicious.