Day, THOMAS, the author of Sandford and Merton, was born in London, 22d June 1748, and thirteen months later, by his father's death, became heir to £900 a year. From the Charterhouse he passed to Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he formed a close friendship with Richard Lovell
Edgeworth (q.v.). In 1765 he entered the Middle Temple, in 1775 was called to the bar, but he never practised. A good, clever eccentric, a disciple of Rousseau, he brought up two children, an orphan blonde and a foundling brunette, one of whom should presently become his wife. That scheme miscarried; and, admitted to the Lichfield coterie, he proposed first to Honora Sneyd, next to her younger sister Elizabeth. She sent him to France to acquire the French graces; as acquired by him, they but moved her to laughter. Finally in 1778 he married an appreciative heiress, Esther Milnes, and spent with her eleven happy years, farming on philanthropic and costly principles in Essex and Surrey, till on 28th September 1789 he was killed by a fall from a colt he was breaking in. His wife died broken-hearted two years afterwards, and both lie in Wargrave churchyard near Henley. Two only of Day's eleven works call for mention—The Dying Negro (1773), and the History of Sandford and Merton (3 vols. 1783-89). The poem struck the keynote of the anti-slavery movement; the child's book, like its author, is sometimes ridiculous, but always excellent. See Day's Life by Keir (1791) and Blackman (1862); also Miss Thackeray's Book of Sibyls (1883).