A NEURO-PSYCHOLOGIST'S PLEA FOR BYRON

By CHARLES HAMILTON HUGHES, M.D.,

ST. LOUIS.

A

DAILY newspaper of this city is certainly doing the youth of this land and the mature as well, and old men too, who do not take time to ponder on the literature of the past, a great service in publishing, regularly, extracts from the great poets. These grand poetic masterpieces from other days impress the higher thought of their day upon our money chasing, gold-fevered age, likely to be impressionless without such reminiscent republications as this enterprising newspaper has undertaken.

Byron's Waterloo from Childe Harold is one of the poems reproduced and to which and to whose author we now refer. This great poem of Byron's with all of the first canto of Childe Harold was written when the author was in his twenty-fourth or twenty-fifth year. Its every line betrays magnificent mental power and heroic exaltation of spirit. No intimation of that degeneracy with which this unfortunate child of genius was subsequently afflicted, appears up to this date in Lord Byron's career.

The real truth about Byron's life harshly misjudged by his moral critics, appears to modern neurological science to be that he became intellectually overwrought and instinctively sought the reaction of reckless psychical and physical dissipation for relief from the pangs of cerebrasthenic brain fag and general nervous exhaustion. He needed the neurologist and brain rest, but the neurologist was not an evolution in Byron's day and if he had been, it is doubtful if Byron had consulted one. Even in our day they who