Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 14.djvu/252

Dayrolles  Walpole may write, it was through intimacy with Chesterfield that Dayrolles while alive secured his promotion and is remembered after his death. For years they kept up an uninterrupted correspondence, and the communications which he received from Chesterfield were for the first time printed in an unmutilated state under the editorship of Lord Mahon, afterwards known as Lord Stanhope. The originals were bought from the heirs of Dayrolles by Messrs. Bentley, and they passed by purchase to Lord Stanhope in April 1846. Maty was assisted in his 'Life of Chesterfield' by Dayrolles, and it was on a call from him that the dying peer, only half an hour before his decease, remarked, with the ruling passion of formality strong in death, 'Give Dayrolles a chair.' He married, on 4 July 1751, Christabella, daughter of Colonel Peterson of Ireland, who is said to have been 'a lady of accomplished manners and dignified appearance.' She died at George Street, Hanover Square, on 3 Aug. 1791, and as her age was at that time given as fifty-eight she must have been considerably younger than her husband. A literary student, called William Cramp, who was anxious to fix the authorship of the 'Letters of Junius' on Lord Chesterfield, published in 1851 a small pamphlet of 'Facsimile Autograph Letters of Junius, Lord Chesterfield, and Mrs. C. Dayrolles, showing that the wife of Mr. Solomon Dayrolles was the amanuensis employed in copying the Letters of Junius for the printer.' This pamphlet was reviewed by C. W. Dilke in the 'Athenæum,' 22 March 1851, and the article is reproduced in Dilke's 'Papers of a Critic,' ii. 140-54. Dayrolles had issue one son, Thomas Philip Dayrolles (a captain in the 10th dragoons, who died at Lausanne, having married Mile. H. G. Thomaset, a Swiss lady) and three daughters. Christabella, the eldest, married in 1784 the Hon. Townsend Ventry. Emily married, on 24 Dec. 1786, the Baron de Reidezel, aide-de-camp to the Duke of Würtemberg; and Mary became the wife, on 6 Feb. 1788, of Richard Croft, junior, a banker in Pall Mall. The youngest of these daughters is said to have been the prototype of the vivacious Miss Larolles in Miss Burney's novel of 'Cecilia.' Which, if either of them, was the lady who, according to Walpole, 'eloped to Leonidas Glover's youngest son,' it is now impossible to say. Dayrolles was a member of the Egyptian Club, a body of gentlemen who had visited Egypt, and had returned with a desire that the origin and history of its antiquities should be studied critically. His own official correspondence and that of his uncle, comprised in twenty-one folio volumes, once belonged to Upcott. Dayrolles was a man of benevolent disposition, set off by the stately manners of the old school.

 DEACON, JAMES (d. 1750), miniature-painter, was talented as an artist and musician. In 1746 the miniature-painter C. F. Zincke was obliged, his eyesight failing, to give up his house in Tavistock Street, Covent Garden, and retire from his profession. Deacon then took this house and the goodwill, no doubt, of the older painter's business. He said to have produced some masterly portraits. In the print room of the British Museum there are miniatures by him of the marine painter Samuel Scott and his wife. He had not long been established in his profession when, attending as a witness at the Old Bailey, apparently at the 'Black Sessions,' he caught the gaol fever and died young in May 1750.

 DEACON, THOMAS (1697–1753), physician and nonjuring bishop, born in 1697, was residing in London in 1715, where he was a prime agent in the Jacobite rebellion. He was ordained deacon and priest by [q. v.] on 12 and 19 March 1715-16, 'at Mr. Gandy's chapel in Scrope Court' (Notes and Queries, 3rd ser. iii. 243). When the Rev. William Paul and John Hall of Otterburn, nonjurors, were executed for complicity in the rebellion of 1715, Deacon visited them in prison, and, after giving them absolution, drew up for them the declarations, which they undertook to deliver to the sheriffs at the scaffold. Josiah Owen, a presbyterian minister at Rochdale, in the preface to the second edition of a pamphlet entitled 'Jacobite and Nonjuring Principles freely examined,' states that Deacon attended the sufferers on the scaffold, and there absolved them. Deacon says that the clergyman who officiated was 'the Rev. Francis Peck, M. A., formerly of Trinity College, Cambridge, but neither he nor any other person did there and then absolve them' (Gent. Mag. xviii. 206). The 'Declarations,' which made a considerable sensation at the time, are reprinted