Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 16.djvu/307



April 1764 to 20 Jan. 1768 he was one of the commissioners for the board of trade, and from 31 Dec. 1768 to March 1774 he was a lord of the treasury. In that month his services were rewarded with the lucrative post of cofferer of the household, and he was at the same time summoned to the privy council. Dyson was allowed, though with extreme reluctance on the part of the premier, to remain in office during the Rockingham administration, and as its acts were known to be frequently distasteful to the monarch, the ‘king's friend’ did not hesitate to show his ‘usual parliamentary sagacity’ in criticising its proceedings. After a flagrant case of insubordination on Dyson's part, the prime minister urged his dismissal, but could not succeed in inducing George III to take that step. Every liberal proposal was opposed by him either openly or secretly. He took a leading place in the business connected with the East India Company in 1767–8, and he joined Rigby and Lord North in opposing George Grenville's bill for removing the trials of contested elections from the whole House of Commons. The repeal of the Stamp Act met with his unflagging opposition, and during Lord North's administration its measures against the American colonies found a warm supporter in Dyson. His quickness and shrewdness were constantly in requisition, and he interposed so often in the business of the house, that Colonel Barré on 26 Jan. 1769 provoked general laughter by remarking, ‘The honourable gentleman, Mr. Dyson, has the devil of a time of it, “Mungo here, Mungo there, Mungo everywhere,”’ an appropriate allusion to a black slave of that name brought on the stage in Isaac Bickerstaffe's comic opera of ‘The Padlock.’ The nickname stuck to him for the rest of his life. There was granted to him in February 1770 a pension on the Irish list of 1,500l. a year for his own life and that of his three sons; but on 25 Nov. 1771, in committee of supply in the Irish House of Commons, after a long and fierce debate, in which Flood exerted all his powers of invective, the pension was condemned by a majority of one vote (105 ayes, 106 noes), and afterwards struck off the list. The grant was in direct contradiction to the pledge of a previous viceroy that no more pensions should be granted on the Irish establishment for a term of years, save in reward of extraordinary services; and even George III acknowledged in 1774 that he was wrong, ‘after what the Duke of Northumberland had declared in my name, in giving the pension.’ Dyson's figure was rendered familiar in the satirical prints of 1769–70, and his loss of the Irish pension was commemorated in a caricature of ‘Alas! poor Mungo,’ which appeared in the same month of November 1771. On one occasion only did Dyson vote in parliament with the whigs, and that was in favour of expunging the vote of thanks to Dr. Nowell for his high prerogative sermon on King Charles's day in 1772. As he went into the lobby he said good-naturedly, in reference to General Keppel, Colonel Fitzroy, and Charles Fox, all descendants of that monarch, ‘If King Charles's grandsons vote against him, sure I may.’ Ill-health had long been his lot, and in October 1774 he was seized with a stroke of the palsy, which incapacitated him from further business. He died on 16 Sept. 1776, aged 54, and a monument in white marble was erected to his memory on the north wall of the northern chancel of Stoke Church, near Guildford. His wife, Dorothy Dyson, a relation of the same name, whom he married about 1758, died on 16 Dec. 1769, aged 34 years, and the same monument records the death of three of their children in early life, and of the wife of his son and heir, Jeremiah Dyson. Dyson purchased about 1765 a considerable estate in Stoke parish, which descended to his son Jeremiah, some time clerk assistant in the House of Commons, by whom it was subsequently sold.

Warburton published in 1744, under the title of ‘Remarks on several occasional Reflections,’ a defence of his portentous volumes, ‘The Divine Legation of Moses,’ and in the preface he commented in a ‘free footing’ on Akenside's poem of the ‘Pleasures of Imagination.’ The poet's offence was a note in the third book of the ‘Pleasures,’ reviving and maintaining the doctrine of the third Lord Shaftesbury that ridicule is the test of truth. Dyson thereupon retaliated in his friend's defence, in ‘An Epistle to the Rev. Mr. Warburton, occasioned by his treatment of the author of the “Pleasures of Imagination.”’ When Akenside determined upon amplifying this poem, he inserted into the first book a glowing panegyric of the friend to whom he owed so much, and by his will, dated in December 1767, his ‘whole estate and effects of whatsoever kind’ passed on his death in June 1770 to Dyson. Two years later (1772) there appeared an edition, very handsomely printed in quarto, of the poems of Akenside, under the superintendence of Dyson, who wrote the advertisement thereto. To his pen is attributed a tract on the right of Wilkes to sit in parliament for the county of Middlesex, entitled ‘The Case of the last Election for Middlesex considered,’ which provoked numerous replies, and among the pamphlets produced at this crisis were, ‘Mungo on the use of Quotations,’ ‘Mungo's Case considered.’