Igloolik in 69° 21′ N., 81° 44′ W., and came home in the autumn of 1823. On 13 Nov. Lyon was promoted to the rank of captain, and the following year he published ‘The Private Journal of Captain G. F. Lyon of H.M.S. Hecla during the recent Voyage of Discovery under Captain Parry’ (8vo, 1824), with plates of costumes, dances, &c. On 16 Jan. 1824 he was presented with the freedom of Chichester, in a casket made of a piece of oak taken from the Hecla. A few days before this, he was appointed to the Griper, originally a gun brig, which had been strengthened for Arctic work, and had been with Parry in his voyage of 1819. Lyon's instructions were to get to Repulse Bay by whatever route he judged best, and from it to examine the coast of the mainland westward ‘to the point where Captain Franklin's late journey terminated’ [cf. Franklin, Sir John]. He sailed on 6 June, but the season proved unfavourable. He was unable to reach Repulse Bay, and returned to England in November, the only result of the voyage being the publication of ‘A Brief Narrative of an Unsuccessful Attempt to reach Repulse Bay through Sir Thomas Rowe's Welcome, in H. M. Ship Griper, in the year 1824’ (8vo, 1825).
In June 1825 the university of Oxford conferred on Lyon an honorary D.C.L.; and in September he married Lucy Louisa, daughter of Lord Edward Fitzgerald [q. v.] Shortly afterwards he went to Mexico as one of the commissioners of the Real del Monte Mining Company. Coming home by way of New York the packet was wrecked at Holyhead on 14 Jan. 1827. Most of Lyon's papers and collections were lost, as he mentions in the introduction to his ‘Journal of a Residence and Tour in the Republic of Mexico in the year 1826, with some Account of the Mines of that Country’ (2 vols. post 8vo, 1828). On landing he received news of the death of his wife four months before. He afterwards went to South America on mining business, but finding his sight failing—the result apparently of an attack of ophthalmia in Africa—he set out for England to obtain medical advice. He died on board the packet from Buenos Ayres on 8 Oct. 1832.
[The original authority for the life of Lyon is in his own writings named above. A good account of his service career, as well as of his travels, is in Marshall's Roy. Nav. Biog. ix. (vol. iii. pt. i.) 100, from which the memoir in Gent. Mag. (1833), pt. i. p. 372, has been abstracted.]
LYON, HART (more correctly Hirsch Löbel or Lewin) (1721–1800), chief rabbi, born at Resha, Poland, in 1721, was son of Rabbi Arjeh Löb (1690–1755), by his wife, a daughter of Rabbi Lewi Ashkenasi, called Chacham Lewi. His father, a well-known Jewish theologian, was rabbi successively of Resha, Glogau, and Amsterdam. At an early age the son distinguished himself by his knowledge of rabbinical literature, and wrote in 1751 with much vigour against Rabbi Jonathan Eybeschütz, who was regarded as an adherent of the Polish Pseudo-Messiah, Sabbathai Zewi. After the death of Aaron Hart [q. v.] in 1756 he was elected chief rabbi of the London congregation of German and Polish Jews, and assumed office in the next year. He was known in this country as Hart Lyon. In 1760 there was published at Altona a Hebrew work by Jacob Kimchi, entitled ‘Shaalah-u-Theshouvah,’ in which the officers of Lyon's synagogue entrusted with the duty of superintending the slaughter of animals by Jewish butchers were charged with neglecting the strict scriptural law. Lyon defended the orthodoxy of his officers, but the wardens of his synagogue refused him permission to make a public reply to Kimchi's charges. Lyon consequently resigned his post in 1763, and accepted an offer of the rabbinate of Halberstadt. He was afterwards called to Mannheim, and ultimately to Berlin, where he was the friend of Moses Mendelssohn, and where he died in 1800. He was both learned and witty. His name figures with that of his father and his son in ‘The Memorial of the Dead,’ which still forms part of the ritual of the chief London synagogue. A manuscript containing the commentary of Gersonides (Ralbag) on Averroes, which Mendelssohn gave him in 1773, is preserved in the London Beth Hammidrash (Neubauer, Cat. No. 43), together with three manuscript volumes of rabbinical ‘Responsa’ by himself (ib. Nos. 24–6). A portrait by Turner was engraved by Fisher.
The son, called Rabbi Saul Berlin (d. 1790), published at Berlin ‘Mizpah yokteel,’ an attack on a learned Talmudical work by Rabbi Raphael Cohen, and a collection of rabbinical ‘Responsa,’ which he falsely pretended to print from the manuscript of an early rabbi, Asher ben Jechiel. The fraud caused him to leave Berlin for London, where he died 19 June 1790 (Steinschneider, Catalogue, p. 2505).
[Dr. H. Adler on the Chief Rabbis of England, in Papers read at the Anglo-Jewish Exhibition (1887), pp. 278, 280–4; Landshuth's Berliner Rabbiner; Graetz's Geschichte der Juden, xi. 45 sq.; Carmoly's Revue Orientale, iii. 219; Auerbach's Geschichte der Israelit. Gemeinde Halberstadt, pp. 89 sq.]
