or fourpence halfpenny a day....

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 sto