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Updated: June 7, 2025
A corps of about 8000 volunteers was ready to start for a descent on the coast of the Papal States. At present it was in the island of Sardinia, awaiting the arrival of Garibaldi to assume the command. And now occurred Garibaldi's mysterious disappearance from Cape Faro, which at the time excited endless curiosity.
Without it, the Italian kingdom could not have been formed. And this fact was due to Cavour, who had to fight the arrayed strength of the old, narrow, military caste at Turin, which had succeeded in getting Garibaldi's sword refused in 1848, and wished for nothing in the world more than to get it refused in 1859.
How Browning and his wife rode far into the country, eating strawberries and drinking milk out of the basins of the peasants; how they fell in with the strangest and most picturesque figures of Italian society; how they climbed mountains and read books and modelled in clay and played on musical instruments; how Browning was made a kind of arbiter between two improvising Italian bards; how he had to escape from a festivity when the sound of Garibaldi's hymn brought the knocking of the Austrian police; these are the things of which his life is full, trifling and picturesque things, a series of interludes, a beautiful and happy story, beginning and ending nowhere.
Garibaldi's task was ended on surrendering his dictatorship; but he had one request to make of Victor Emmanuel, to whom he had given a throne. He besought him to dismiss Cavour, and to be himself allowed to march on Rome, for he hated the Pope with terrible hatred, and called him Antichrist, both because he oppressed his subjects and was hostile to the independence of Italy.
Colonel Peard, 'Garibaldi's Englishman, went in advance of the army to Eboli, where he was mistaken, as commonly happened, for his chief. He was past middle age; very tall, with a magnificent beard and a stern, dictatorial air, which answered admirably to the popular idea of what the conqueror of Sicily ought to be like, although there was no resemblance to the real person.
Haseltine and I would drive out to Garibaldi's villa, the friend and the friend of the friend would be there to meet us and present us. This we did, and found the two gentlemen awaiting us at the gate. I felt my heart beat a little faster at the thought of seeing the great hero.
It was a sort of ragout of real and shady celebrities, an amusing, bustling crowd, half Bohemian, half aristocratic, entirely cosmopolitan. Prince Andras remembered once having dined with a staff officer of Garibaldi's army on one side of him, and the Pope's nuncio on the other. On a certain evening the Baroness was very anxious that the Prince should not refuse her latest invitation.
On the 27th he was in front of the Porta Termina of Palermo, and at once gave the signal for the attack. The people rose in mass, and assisted the operations of the besiegers by barricade-fighting in the streets. In a few hours half the town was in Garibaldi's hands.
If Peard has been called "Garibaldi's Englishman," truly Jessie White Mario deserves yet more emphatically the title of "Garibaldi's Englishwoman." She has published a large life of Garibaldi, which is far and away the best and most trustworthy account of the man and his wonderful works.
Garibaldi's own headquarters was with the reserves at Caserta, but he appeared, as if by magic, at all parts of the line during the day, sometimes bringing up reinforcements, sometimes almost alone, always arriving at the nick of time whenever things looked serious, to help, direct and reanimate the men.
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