(_Miss Nightingale to Harriet Martineau._) 115 PARK ST., _April 28_ [1864]. You may have heard that I have seen Garibaldi. I resisted it with all my might, but I was obliged to do it. I asked no one to look at him--told no one--and he came in my brother-in-law's carriage, hoping that no one would know. But it all failed. We had a long interview by ourselves. I was more struck with the greatness of that noble heart--full of bitterness, yet not bitter--and with the smallness of the administrative capacity, than even I expected. He raves for a Government "like the English." But he knows no more what it is than his King Bomba did. (It was for this that I was to speak to him.) One year of such a life, as I have led for ten years, would tell him more of how one has to give and take with a "representative Government" than all his Utopia and his "ideal." You will smile. But he reminds me of Plato. He talks about the "ideal good" and the "ideal bad"; about his not caring for "repubblica" or for "monarchia": he only wants "the right." Alas! alas! What a pity--that utter impracticability! I pity _me_ very much. And of all my years, this last has been the hardest. But now I see that no _man_ would have put up with what I have put up with for ten years, to do even the little I have done--which is about a hundredth part of what I have tried for. Garibaldi looks flushed and very ill, worn and depressed--not excited. He looks as if he stood and went thro' all this as he stood under the bullets of Aspromonte--a duty which he was here to perform. The madness of the Italians here in urging him is inconceivable. [63] See the _Times_, April 18, 1864. The interview took place on Sunday afternoon April 17. On the day before, Garibaldi had been at Bedford. Miss Nightingale, we may safely infer, did not inspire Garibaldi with divine fervour for sanitary reform or any merely administrative progress. Administration in any sort was foreign to his genius. But she felt, after the interview no less than before, that it was a great occasion to her. The interview took place at 115 Park Street, a house belonging to the Grosvenor Hotel, and she presented the Hotel with a bust of Garibaldi as a memento of the occasion. Another of her heroes was Abraham Lincoln, of whom she wrote this appreciation[64]:--