Day had heretofore suggested a certain effeminate bearing in his character; he recognised it, and was now suddenly beset with a consuming desire to supplant this manner by an overtowering manliness, by the exercise of firmness and strength. But the new policy was to prove his undoing. On the afternoon of September 28, 1789, he went to ride on an unbroken horse, believing to curb him by the discipline of command rather than of the stock. The animal took fright and threw him; he received injuries from which he almost immediately died. On the evidence of Miss Seward, it is recorded that Mrs. Day thereafter “lay in bed, into the curtains of which no light was admitted, ... and only rose to stray alone through her garden when night gave her sorrows congenial gloom.” The estimate of such a work as “Sandford and Merton” cannot be based upon modern standards; all of the factors characteristic of the didactic writers for children, such as persistent questioning, the encyclopædic grown person in the shape of Mr. Barlow, and the monotonous interchange of narrative and dialogue, are employed as vehicles for knowledge. The book is unique, inasmuch as it sought to supply a variety of stories suitable in style and content for the beginner. “The only method I could invent,” writes Day, “was to select such passages of different books as were most adapted to their experience and understanding. The least exceptionable that I could find for this purpose were Plutarch’s Lives, and Zenophon’s History of the Institution of Cyrus, in English translations; with some part of Robinson Crusoe, and a few passages in the first volume of Mr. Brook’s Fool of Quality.” In those days, if authors are to be believed, birds were in the habit of alighting on the hands of good children; they are more timid now, though children are not less good. The poor boy was made to feel how kind the good rich boy was to him throughout his shocking adversity; we are more considerate to-day. And so, Tommy Merton and Harry Sandford, products of a stilted age, are clad in uniforms similar to those worn by Miss Edgeworth’s children. They are endowed with no exceptional qualities, with no defined will power; they stand in a long row of similarly subjected slaves of theory. Miss Agnes Repplier calls this story one of her early moral pitfalls. She read it at a period when information was being forced down her, and “which,” so she writes, “I received as responsively as does a Strassburg goose its daily share of provender.”