strong
admiration for many of both Steele and Addison's papers.

* * * * *

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,