Davis all along flattered himself with the hopes of a pardon or a reprieve and therefore was not perhaps so serious as he ought, and as he otherwise would have been.  Not that those hopes made him either licentious or turbulent, but rather disturbed his meditations and hindered his getting over the terrors which death always brings to the unprepared.  But when, on his name being in the death warrant, he found there was no longer any hopes, he then, indeed, applied himself without losing a moment to the great concern of saving his soul, now there was no hopes of preserving his body.

However, neither his education nor all the assistance he could receive from those divines that visited him, could bring him to bear the approach of death with any tolerable patience.  Even at the place of execution, he endeavoured as much as he could to linger away the time, spoke to the Ordinary to spin out the prayers, and to the executioner to forbear doing his office as long as it was possible.  However, he spoke with great kindness and affection to his companion, Mr. Harman, shook hands with those who were his companions in death, and at last submitted to his fate, being then about twenty-three years of age.

FOOTNOTES: 

   [42] The Southwark Mint was a sanctuary for insolvent debtors
        and a nest of infamy in general.  It stood over against St.
        George’s church.

The Life of JAMES HARMAN, Highwayman

James Harman was the son of a merchant in the City of London, who took care to furnish his son with such an education as enabled him, when about fourteen years of age, to be removed to the University.  His behaviour there was like that of too many others, spent in diversities instead of study, and in a progression of vice, instead of improving in learning.  After having been there about three years, and having run into such debts as he saw no probability of discharging, he was forced to leave it abruptly; and his father, much grieved at this behaviour, bought him an ensign’s commission in the army, where he continued in Jones’s Regiment till it was disbanded.  Then, indeed, being forced to live as he could, and the assistance of friends, though large, yet no ways suited to his expenses, he became so plunged in debt and other misfortunes that he was in necessity of going over to the Mint, where reflecting on his own follies, he became very reserved and melancholy.  He would probably have quite altered his course of life if opportunity had offered, or if he had not fallen in that company which by a similarity of manner induced him to fall into the commission of such crimes as would not probably have otherwise entered his head.

The fact which he and the before-mentioned Davis committed, was their first and last attempt, but Mr. Harman, all the time he lay under sentence (without suffering himself to be amused by expectations of success from those endeavours which he knew his friends used to save his life,) accustomed himself to the thoughts of death, performing all the duties requisite from a person of his condition for atoning the evils of a misspent life, and making his peace with that Being from whom he had received so great a capacity of doing well, and which he had so much abused.