Excerpt from The Life of John Nicholson, Soldier and Administrator: Based on Private and Hitherto Unpublished Documents F orty years ago brigadier-general John Nicholson vanished like a meteor from the scene of his gloriously brief career. Since then his heroic figure has marched across many a page of commemorative print, from the careful narratives of cave-browne and Kaye down to the most brilliant of Mrs. Steele's romances. The heroic Nicholson is the title by which the men of his own generation love to speak of the young soldier-statesman who led his stormers against fearful odds into the central stronghold of the great Sepoy rebellion in 1857. History, gossip, and prose fiction have busied themselves with the deeds and character of John Nicholson; and numerous legends, well invented but more or less untrue, have grown up around his name. How is it, by the way, that no English poet of any mark has commemorated the fall of Delhi, that master-incident in the story of the great Mutiny? Tennyson has glorified the defence of Lucknow, and Gerald Massey has sung of Havelock's march and Sir William Peel. But the siege and storming of Delhi have remained unsung, except by Mr. Charles Kelly of the Indian Civil Service, and one or two other forgotten poets. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.