to give up the provincial tour. 20.--In the evening the
great entertainment to Garibaldi came off. Before the door at
night say a thousand people all in the best of humour, the hall
and stair full before dinner. A hostile demonstration invaded us
at ten, but we ejected them. I settled about to-morrow with
Garibaldi, the Duke of Sutherland, Lord Palmerston, and Lord
Shaftesbury. My nerves would not let me--hardened as I am--sleep
till after five.

(M32) Suddenly one morning the country was surprised to learn that
Garibaldi was at once departing. Dark suspicions rose instantly in the
minds of his more democratic friends. It had always been rather bitter to
them that he should be the guest of a duke. They now insisted that the
whig aristocrats were in a panic lest he should compromise himself with
the radicals, and that he was being hustled out of the country against his
will. This suspicion next grew into something blacker still. A story
spread that the Emperor of the French had taken umbrage, and signified to
the government that the reception of Garibaldi was distasteful to France.
Lord Clarendon promptly denied the fable. He told the House of Lords that
the Emperor (of whom he had recently had an audience) had even expressed
his admiration for the feeling of which the reception was a sign. Lord
Palmerston in the other House explained that Garibaldi was going away
earlier than had been expected, because at home he went to bed at eight
and rose at five, and to a person of these habits to dine at half past
eight and to remain in a throng of admirers until midnight must
necessarily be injurious. Still the fog hung heavy on the public mind. A
rider was now added to the tale, that it was the chancellor of the
exchequer who out of deference to the Emperor, or to please the whigs, or
out of complaisance to the court, had induced the hero to take his hurried
leave. Mr. Gladstone was forced to explain to the House of Commons, seldom
reluctant to lighten its graver deliberations with a personal incident,
that the Duke of Sutherland had carried him to Stafford House; there he
found that Garibaldi had accepted invitations to thirty provincial towns
and that the list was growing longer every day; the doctors declared that
the general's strength would never stand the exhaustion of a progress on
such a scale; and the friends there present begged him to express his own
opinion to Garibaldi. This Mr. Gladsto