Thus he read his own character, and we need not subject it to a searching analysis. In action lay his strength. He trusted instinct against any argument. Hence the single-minded zeal with which he plunged into every enterprise; hence, too, his inability to weigh other policies than his own, and his distrust, often intensified into unreasoning prejudice, of those who differed from him. If his kindly, generous nature often made him the dupe of schemers, the wonder is that they did not beguile him into irreparable excesses. He was saved partly by a thread of common sense and partly by self-respect akin to vanity, which kept him constantly on the alert against being used as a tool. Although modest, he knew so well the grandeur of the part he was playing that he took no pains to dissemble the childlike delight he felt at demonstrations of his popularity. The lifelong champion of democracy, he behaved, in practice, as autocratically as Cromwell; a believer in dictatorships, never able to work successfully as yoke-fellow or subordinate to any one else. Like the dreamers, he could not comprehend that human society, being a growth and not a manufacture, cannot be suddenly lifted by benevolent manifesto or patriotic resolution. He scorned parliamentary debates, he reviled diplomacy, he underrated counsel. But what he had, he had superlatively: valor, presence of mind, geniality, unselfishness, magnanimity,--he had all these, the qualities of a popular soldier, to a degree which made whoever fought with him worship him. No other man of his time, nor perhaps of any time, inspired so many human beings with personal affection--as distinguished from that devotion which other favorite captains have inspired--as he did. Every one of his soldiers felt that in Garibaldi he had not merely a commander but a brother; every person who approached him acknowledged his fascination. Strip off Garibaldi’s eccentricities, look into his heart, contemplate his achievements,--we behold a hero of the Homeric brood. Again we enter the presence of a man of a few elemental traits, whose habit it was to exhibit his passions without that reserve which belongs to our sophisticated age. Like Achilles, he wept when he was moved, he sulked when he was angry. Equally simple was the mainspring of his action. He obeyed two ideals, and those two of the noblest,--love of liberty and love of his fellow-men: nay, more, he obeyed them as quickly when they led into exile, poverty, and danger as when they led him to a conquest unparalleled in modern history, and to fame in which the wonder and the affection of the world blended in equal parts.