Fortune has one gift which she begrudges even to her darlings: she does not allow them to die at the summit of their career. Either too soon for their country’s good, or too late for their personal fame, she sends death to dispatch them. Pericles, Cavour, Lincoln, were snatched away prematurely; Themistocles and Grant should have prayed to be released before they had slipped below their zenith. So, too, Garibaldi lacked nothing but that, after having redeemed a kingdom by one of the most splendid expeditions in history, and after having given it to the unifier of his fatherland, he should have vanished from the earth. Thanks to a kindlier fortune, the old Hebrew prophets were translated, and the Homeric heroes were borne off invisible, at the perfect moment. But while Garibaldi lacked this epic finale to his epic career, the closing decades of his life were as characteristic as any. In the spring of 1861 he reappeared on the scene at the opening of the first parliament of the Kingdom of Italy, to which he had been chosen deputy by many districts. He came, not jubilant but angry. Nice, his home, had been ceded to France in payment for French aid in the war of 1859: against Cavour, who had consented to this bargain, Garibaldi conceived the most intense hatred, and on the floor of the House he fulminated at the Prime Minister whose “treason had made Garibaldi a foreigner in his native land.” He complained, further, because the officers and soldiers of the Garibaldian army had not been generously treated by the government. The outburst was most deplorable. Many feared that the hero’s testiness might lead to civil war; and though the King arranged a meeting, in the hope of bringing about a reconciliation, Garibaldi went from it with bitterness in his heart. Six weeks later, on June 6, Cavour, stricken by fever, died when his country needed him most. Little did Garibaldi realize that in the great statesman’s death he was losing the man who had been indispensable to his success in Sicily, and whose judgment was needed to direct Garibaldian impulses to a fruitful end. Only Rome and Venetia now remained ununited to the Kingdom of Italy: in Rome a French garrison propped the Pope’s despised temporal power; in Venetia the Austrian regiments held fast. To rescue the Italians still in bondage, and to complete the unification of Italy, were henceforth Garibaldi’s aims. He paid no heed to the diplomatic embarrassments which his schemes might create; for as usual he regarded diplomacy as a device by which cowards, knaves, and traitors thwarted the desires of patriots.