Toland died in Putney on 10 March 1722.[4] The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica says of him that at his death in London at age 51 "he died... as he had lived, in great poverty, in the midst of his books, with his pen in his hand." Just before he died, he composed his own epitaph, part of which reads: "He was an assertor of liberty, a lover of all sorts of learning ... but no man’s follower or dependent. Nor could frowns or fortune bend him to decline from the ways he had chosen."