Page:In Spite of Epilepsy, Woods, 1913.djvu/204

192 into hysterics, and Lord Byron "had an attack of his epilepsy" and was carried out of the house in spasms.

That the "noble lord" was not born with a silver spoon, or rather with a "rosebud in his mouth, and a nightingale singing in his ear," as Rogers said of a brother bard, is very evident, for he differed from Cæsar and Mohammed inasmuch as he came of neurotic stock. His mother had "nerves" and a shrill voice, an unpardonable thing in woman, and she did not belong to "The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children." When irritated by the pranks of her erratic offspring, her favorite weapon was a poker. When she could not strike her darling with it while holding it in her hand, she made it fly after him like a hawk after a swallow. She "was subject, too, to hurricane bursts of temper," and she frequently taunted her son with his lameness. She believed in fortune-telling, palmistry, and presentiments, was subject to violent attacks of frenzy, and was so easily affected because of an otherwise irritable nervous system that she also while a girl, on seeing in Edinburgh Mrs. Siddons in the character of Isabella, was so impressed that she went into convulsions and came near causing a panic in the house. She was the sort of woman that might have been benefited by Christian Science or any of the "Faith Cures," since she did not seem always to have control of herself and believed too implicitly in the omnipotence of drugs.

Of Byron's daughter Ada, who afterward became the Duchess of Lovelace and a most charming and