Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 2.djvu/245

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GIUSEPPE GARIBALDI 389 GIUSEPPE GARIBALDI (1807-1882) GARIBALDI has not left the world with- out some account of his birth, parent- age, and early life. Not a little of his great, naive, and enthusiastic character may be studied in those Memoirs, of which his eccentric friend, Alexander Dumas, pub- lished a free translation. He was born July 22, 1807. He was a native of Nice, a city inhabited by a mongrel race, but himself sprung from a purely Italian fam- ily. The name of Garibaldi, common enough throughout North Italy, betokens old Lombard descent. He first saw light, as he states, in the very house and room where, forty-nine years before, Massena was born. His father, Domenico, had come from Chiavari, in the Riviera di Levante ; he gives his mother's name Rosa Raguindo. Garibaldi's father and grandfather were seamen, and he took to the sea as his native elem.ent, developing great strength and skill as a swim- mer, an accomplishment which enabled him to save drowning men on several memorable occasions. For what book learning he had he seems to have been in- debted to the desultory lessons of priestly schoolmasters under the direction of his mother. Of this latter he always spoke with great tenderness, acknowledg- ing that "to her inspiration he owed his patriotic feelings," and stating that "in his greatest dangers by land and sea his imagination always conjured up the picture of the pious woman prostrated at the feet of the Most High interceding for the safety of her beloved." In early life he embarked in his father's merchant vessel, a brig, and in that and other craft he made frequent voyages to Odessa, Rome, and Constantinople. Soon after the revolutionary movements of 1831 he was at Marseilles, where he fell in with Mazzini, busy at that time with the organization of " Young Italy " and with the preparations for an invasion of Italy by sea, which, upon Mazzini's expulsion from Marseilles, was attempted at Geneva, and directed against the Savoy frontier. The Savoy expedition turned out an egregious failure, the blame of which Garibaldi, on Mazzini's statement, throws on the Polish General Ramo- rino's treachery. Garibaldi himself, who had embarked on board the royal frig- ate Eurydice to gain possession of that vessel by a mutiny of the crew, being off Genoa, and hearing of a plot to storm the barracks of the Carabinieri. landed in