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The list that I promised to give of Julie’s published stories is now completed; and, if her works are to be valued by their length, it may justly be said that she has not left a vast amount of matter behind her, but I think that those who study her writings carefully, will feel that some of their greatest worth lies in the wonderful condensation and high finish that they display.  No reviewer has made a more apt comparison than the American one in Every other Saturday, who spoke of “Jackanapes” as “an exquisite bit of finished work—­a Meissonier, in its way.”

To other readers the chief value of the books will be in the high purpose of their teaching, and the consciousness that Julie held her talent as a direct gift from GOD, and never used it otherwise than to His glory.  She has penned nothing for which she need fear reproach from her favourite old proverb, “A wicked book is all the wickeder because it can never repent.”  It is difficult for those who admire her writings to help regretting that her life was cut off before she had accomplished more, but to still such regrets we cannot do better than realize (as a kind friend remarked) “how much she has been able to do, rather than what she has left undone.”  The work which she did, in spite of her physical fragility, far exceeds what the majority of us perform with stronger bodies and longer lives.  This reflection has comforted me, though I perhaps know more than others how many subjects she had intended to write stories upon.  Some people have spoken as if her forte lay in writing about soldiers only, but her success in this line was really due to her having spent much time among them.  I am sure her imagination and sympathy were so strong, that whatever class of men she was mixed with, she could not help throwing herself into their interests, and weaving romances about them.  Whether such romances ever got on to paper was a matter dependent on outward circumstances and the state of her health.

One of the unwritten stories which I most regret is “Grim the Collier”; this was to have been a romance of the Black Country of coal-mines, in which she was born, and the title was chosen from the description of a flower in a copy of Gerarde’s Herbal, given to her by Miss Sargant:—­

Hieracium hortense latifolium, sine Pilosella maior, Golden Mouseeare, or Grim the Colliar.  The floures grow at the top as it were in an vmbel, and are of the bignesse of the ordinary Mouseeare, and of an orenge colour.  The seeds are round, and blackish, and are carried away with the downe by the wind.  The stalks and cups of the flours are all set thicke with a blackish downe, or hairinesse, as it were the dust of coles; whence the women who keepe it in gardens for novelties sake, have named it Grim the Colliar.

I wish, too, that Julie could have written about sailors, as well as soldiers, in the tale of “Little