This great change in his circumstance and manner of living, added to his own uneasy reflections upon those misfortunes into which vanity and ostentation had brought him, soon reduced him by sickness to so weak a state that he was incapable, almost, of coming to chapel alone.  Notwithstanding this, he continued to frequent it, some of the people about the prison being so kind as to help him upstairs.  As his vices arose rather from the imitation of those fine gentlemen on whom he had waited while a lad, so he did not carry them to that height which most of these unhappy persons are wont to do; on the contrary he was very sober, little addicted to gambling, and never followed the common women of the town.  But dress, dancing bouts, and the necessary entertainments for carrying on his amours were the follies which involved him in these expenses, for the supply of which he thus hazarded his soul and forfeited his life.

When the death warrant came down his sickness had brought him so low that Nature seemed inclined to supersede the severity of the Law; but too short a time which intervened between it and its execution, and so he came to suffer a violent death at Tyburn a day or two before, perhaps, he would otherwise have yielded up his breath in his bed.  Little could be expected of a person in his weak condition, at the place of execution, where, when he arrived he was utterly unable to stand up.  However, with a faint voice he desired the prayers both of the minister who attended them and of the spectators of his execution, which happened on the 20th of November, 1727, in the twenty-sixth year of his age.

The Life of JOHN JOHNSON, a Coiner

In excuse of taking base measures to procure money there is no plea so often urged as necessity, and the desire of providing for a family otherwise in danger of want.  The reason of this is pretty evident, since nothing could be a greater alleviation of such a crime.  But the word necessity is so equivocal that it is hard to fix its true meaning, and unless that can be done, it will be as hard to judge of the reasonableness of such an excuse.

John Johnson, the criminal on whose life we are next to cast an eye, was born of a very honest and reputable family in the county of Nottingham, and received in his youth the best education they were capable of giving him.  By this he became able to read tolerably and write well enough for that business to which he was bred, viz., a tailor.  Throughout his apprenticeship he behaved himself virtuously and industriously, and left his master with the character of a faithful and deserving young man.  When his time was out, and he had wrought for some time as a journeyman in the country, the common whim of coming up to London seized him; and after he had spent some time in town in working hard at his trade, he married a wife with whom he lived in good correspondence for many years, with the esteem and respect of all who knew him.  But his family increasing and he consequently finding the charge of maintaining them rise higher than formerly, and, what was worse, that all he was capable of doing could not maintain them, he grew very melancholy.