Nicholson was of Irish birth, the son of a Dublin physician, who had seen twenty years’ service in India—service brilliant and varied beyond even what is common in that field of great deeds. There is no space here to tell the story of Nicholson’s career, but as he rode into the British camp that August morning, he was beyond all question the most picturesque and striking figure in India. He was a man of splendid physique, and is said to have borne an almost bewildering resemblance to the Czar Nicholas. He was six feet two in height, strongly built, with a flowing dark-coloured beard, colourless face, grey eyes, with dark pupils, in whose depths, when he was aroused, a point of steady light, as of steel or of flame, would kindle. Few men, indeed, could sustain the piercing look of those lustrous, menacing eyes. His voice had a curious depth in it; his whole bearing a singular air of command and strength—an impression which his habit of rare and curt speech intensified. “He was a man,” says one who knew him well, “cast in a giant mould, with massive chest and powerful limbs, and an expression, ardent and commanding, with a dash of roughness; features of stern beauty, a long black beard, and sonorous voice. His imperial air never left him.” “Nicholson,” says Lord Roberts, “impressed me more profoundly than any man I had ever met before, or have ever met since.” Nicholson, like the Lawrences, like Havelock, and Herbert Edwardes, and many of the Indian heroes of that generation, was a man of rough but sincere piety, and this did not weaken his soldiership—it rather gave a new loftiness to its ideals and a steadier pulse to its courage. “If there is a desperate deed to be done in India,” Herbert Edwardes told Lord Canning, “John Nicholson is the man to do it”; and exactly that impression and conviction Nicholson kindled in everybody about him. “He had,” says Mrs. Steel, “the great gift. He could put his own heart into a whole camp, and make it believe it was its own.” Such a masterful will and personality as that of Nicholson took absolutely captive the imagination of the wild, irregular soldiery of which he was the leader.