This year, 1864, was marked by an incident which, though not a political event, should never be forgotten in the history of Italian liberation—­Garibaldi’s visit to England.  He came, the prisoner of Aspromonte, not the conqueror of Sicily:  a distinction that might have made a difference elsewhere, but the English sometimes worship misfortune as other peoples worship success.  No sovereign from oversea was ever received by them as they received the Italian hero; a reception showing the sympathies of a century rather than the caprice or curiosity of an hour.  Half a million throats shouted London’s welcome; the soldier of two worlds knew the roar of battle, and the roar of the sea was familiar to the Nizzard sailor, but it is said that when Garibaldi heard the stupendous and almost awful British roar which greeted him as he came out of the Nine Elms station, and took his seat in the carriage that was to convey him to Stafford House, he looked completely disconcerted.  From the heir to the throne to the crossing-sweeper, all combined to do him honour; where Garibaldi was not, through the breadth of the land the very poor bought his portrait and pasted it on their whitewashed cottage walls.  London made him its citizen.  The greatest living English poet invited him to plant a tree in his garden:  a memory he recalled nearly at the close of his own honoured life:—­

  Or watch the waving pine which here
    The warrior of Caprera set,
    A name that earth shall not forget
  Till earth has rolled her latest year.

Garibaldi showed himself mindful of old friends; at the opera he recognised Admiral Mundy in a box, and immediately rose and went to offer him his respects.  At Portsmouth, he not only went to see the mother of Signora White-Mario (the providence of his wounded in many a campaign), but also paid an unrecorded visit to two maiden sisters in humble circumstances, who had shown him kindness when he was an exile in England; they related ever afterwards the sensation caused by his appearance in their narrow courtyard, where it was difficult to turn the big carriage which the authorities had placed at his disposal.  He twice met the great Italian whom he addressed as Master:  transferring, as it were, to Mazzini’s brows the crown of glory that surrounded his own.  Another exile, Louis Blanc, used to tell how, when he went to call on Garibaldi, he found him seated on a sofa, receiving the homage of the fairest and most illustrious members of the English aristocracy; when the Friend of the People was announced (a title deserved by Louis Blanc, if not for his possibly fallacious theories, still for the rare sincerity of his life), the hero started to his feet and most earnestly begged him to sit beside him.  ’Which I could not do!’ the narrator of the scene would add with a look of comical alarm for his threatened modesty.