The Letters were the last things that my sister wrote; but some brief papers which she contributed to The Child's Pictorial Magazine were not published until after her death. In the May number "Tiny's Tricks and Toby's Tricks" came out, and in the numbers for June, July, and August 1885, there were three "Hoots" from "The Owl in the Ivy Bush; or the Children's Bird of Wisdom." They are in the form of quaint letters of advice, and my sister adopted the Spectator's method of writing as an eye-witness in the first person, so far as was possible in addressing a very youthful class of readers. She had a 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, 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 Mothers' Meetings," which had been suggested to her mind by visits to Liverpool. The sight of a baby patient in the Children's Hospital there, who had been paralyzed and made speechless by fright, but who took so strange a fancy to my sister's sympathetic face that he held her hand and could scarcely be induced to release it, had affected her deeply. So did a visit that she paid one Sunday to the Seamen's Orphanage, where she heard the voices of hundreds of fatherless children ascending with one accord in the words, "I will arise and go to my Father," and realized the Love that watched over them. These scenes were both to have been woven into the tale, and the "Little Mothers" were boy nurses of baby brothers and sisters.
Another phase of sailor life on which Julie hoped to write was the "Guild of Merchant Adventurers of Bristol." She had visited their quaint Hall, and collected a good deal of historical information and local colouring for the tale, and its lesson would have been one on mercantile honour.
I hope I have kept my original promise, that whilst I was making a list of Julie's writings, I would also supply an outline biography of her life; but now, if the Children wish to learn something of her at its End, they shall be told in her own words:—
Madam Liberality grew up into much the same sort of person that she was when a child. She always had been what is termed old-fashioned, and the older she grew the better her old-fashionedness became her, so that at last her friends would say to her, "Ah, if we all wore as well as you do, my dear! You've hardly changed at all since we remember you in short petticoats." So far as she did change, the change was for the better. (It is to be hoped we do improve a little as we get older.) She was still liberal and economical. She still planned and hoped indefatigably. She was still tender-hearted in the sense in which Gray speaks—