"My dear Nicholson,
"You remember that you kindly furnished me with your prescription for tic douleureux to give to my friend Pulszky. He told me a few days back that he sent it (I think a year ago) to the poor girl at Ventnor who was a horrible sufferer from it, and heard no more of it until this autumn when he was at Ventnor again. He was delighted to find she had been immediately cured by it, had had no returns, was made competent for work, and is in a servant's place. On my naming this, I have two urgent applications for the prescriptions. If you will a second time take the trouble to copy out the prescription I will keep it myself, and give copies to my friends without further coming upon you…. I have ventured to assert that the Nicholson who is so talked of as promoting the ballot in Australia is not your brother Mark.
"Do you know, when I saw in the Illustrated London News the face of the late lamented Brigadier Nicholson of the Punjaub, I thought it very like you. Is he possibly a distant relative?
"Ever yours heartily,
"F. W. Newman, "7 P.V.E." "20th December, 1857.
This remark of Newman's that he saw a strong likeness in "the face of the late lamented Brigadier Nicholson of the Punjaub" to his friend Dr. Nicholson is one of those arresting suggestions which seem to strike sudden light out of the flints of ancestry which whiten the road of life along which we have come.
That there is a distinct likeness in the two faces no one who had seen the portraits in Captain Lionel Trotter's Life of John Nicholson, and then looked at that of Dr. John Nicholson in this book, could have had a doubt. But, as it seems to me, there is even more ground for the likelihood of Newman's suggestion, if one tries to trace the lineage and land of the families of Nicholson in years gone by. I quote the following from Captain Trotter's Life of John Nicholson:—
"In the days of our Tudor sovereigns the family of which John Nicholson was to be the bright particular star had made their home in the border county of Cumberland." He goes on to say that the first to come over to Ireland was Rev. William Nicholson (in 1589), and he married the Lady Elizabeth Percy. Captain Trotter says there is a tradition that his two brothers went over to Ireland with William Nicholson. One settled in Derry, the other in Dublin. During McGuire's rebellion in 1641, his son's wife and her baby boy "were the only two in Cran-na-gael" [now known as Cranagill] "who escaped the common massacre by hiding behind some brushwood. In their wanderings thence they fell in with a party of loyalist soldiers, who escorted them safely to Dromore, whence they made their way across sea to the widow's former home at Whitehaven…." What became of this Mrs. Nicholson does not appear. "Her son William, during his sojourn in Cumberland, had become a Quaker." This was very probably due to his having been influenced by his intercourse with George Fox. Later on the former went back to Cranagill. There were three sons born to this William Nicholson, and Captain Trotter tells us that it was from the eldest (also a "William") that the famous John Nicholson was descended.
Now, it seems to me that it is not at all unlikely that there may have been some connection (as Francis Newman suggested) between the branch of the Nicholson family to which John Nicholson, of Mutiny fame, was related, who made their home in the "border county of Cumberland," and that to which Dr. John Nicholson, the lifelong friend of Francis Newman, belonged. The latter also belonged to a north country family who, I believe, settled on the borders of England and Scotland. Dr. Nicholson himself lived for a great number of years at Penrith, in Cumberland. So that, all things considered, perhaps Newman's conjecture, after he had realized how strong a resemblance there was in his friend's face to that of the hero of Delhi, was correct.
The next letters belong to the year 1858. In August, 1858, Newman was again devoting much time to Latin versification:—