But he would not listen to me—­only repeated with increasing excitement that no good could come to humanity till all priests were destroyed.

Then we talked about the Marries, of both of whom he spoke with the greatest affection; and of the prospects of “going to Rome,” which of course he considered the simplest and easiest thing possible.

I saw Garibaldi on many subsequent occasions, but never again tete-a-tete, or a Quattro Oct, as the Italians more significantly phrase it.  The last time I ever saw him was under melancholy circumstances enough, though the occasion professed to be one of rejoicing.  It was at the great gathering at Palermo for celebrating the anniversary of the Sicilian Vespers.  Of course such a celebration would have brought Garibaldi to partake in it, wherever he might have been, short of in his grave.  And truly he was then very near that.  It was a melancholy business.  He was brought from the steamer to his bed in the hotel on a litter through the streets lined by the thousands who had gathered to see him, but who had been warned that his condition was such, that the excitement occasioned by any shouting would be perilous to him.  Amid dead silence his litter passed through the crowds who were longing to welcome him to the scene of his old triumphs!  Truly it was more like a funeral procession than one of rejoicing.

It was very shortly before his death, which many people thought had been accelerated by that last effort to make his boundless popularity available for the propagation of Radicalism.

Peard’s words reveal with exactitude the deficiency which lay at the root of all the blunders, follies, and imprudence which rendered his career less largely beneficent for Italy than it might have been.  “He had no judgment of character,” and was too honest to believe in knavery.  It must be added that he was too little intelligent to detect it, or to estimate the consequences of it.  Of any large views of social life, or of the means by which, and the objects for which, men should be governed, he was as innocent as a baby.  In a word, he was not an intellectual man.  All the high qualities which placed him on the pinnacle he occupied were qualities of the heart and not of the head.  They availed with admirable success to fit him for exercising a supreme influence over men, especially young men, in the field, and for all the duties of a guerilla leader.  They would not have sufficed to make him a great commander of armies; and did still less fit him for becoming a political leader.

Whom next shall I present to the reader from the portrait gallery of my reminiscences?

Come forward, Franz Pulszky, most genial, most large-hearted of philosophers and friends!—­I can’t say “guides,” for though he was both the first, he was not the last, differing widely as we did upon—­perhaps not most, but at all events—­many large subjects.