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Henry Luttrell

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

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HENRY LUTTRELL ( c. 1765-1851), English wit and writer of society verse, was the illegitimate son of Henry Lawes Luttrell, 2nd earl of Carhampton a grandson of Colonel Henry Luttrell ( c. 1655-1717), who served James II. in Ireland in 1689 and 1690, and afterwards deserted him, being murdered in Dublin in November 1717. Colonel Luttrell's son Simon (1713-1787) was created earl of Carhampton in 1785, and the latter's son was Henry Lawes Luttrell. Before succeeding to the peerage, the 2nd earl, then Colonel Luttrell, had won notoriety by opposing John Wilkes at the Middlesex election of 1769. He was beaten at the poll, but the House of Commons declared that he and not Wilkes had been elected. In 1796 he was made commander of the forces in Ireland and in 1798 he became a general. Being an Irish peer, Carhampton was able to sit in the English parliament until his death in April 1821. The earldom became extinct on the death of his brother John, the 3rd earl, in 1829.

Henry Luttrell secured a seat in the Irish parliament in 1798 and a post in the Irish government, which he commuted for a pension. Introduced into London society by the duchess of Devonshire, his wit made him popular. Soon he began to write verse, in which the foibles of fashionable people were outlined. In 1820 he published his Advice to Julia, of which a second edition, altered and amplified, appeared in 1823 as Letters to Julia in Rhyme. This poem, suggested by the ode to Lydia in the first book of Horace's Odes, was his most important work. His more serious literary contemporaries nicknamed it "Letters of a Dandy to a Dolly." In 1827 in Crockford House he wrote a satire on the high play then in vogue. Byron characterized him as "the best sayer of good things, and the most epigrammatic conversationist I ever met"; Sir Walter Scott wrote of him as "the great London wit," and Lady Blessington described him as the one talker "who always makes me think." Luttrell died in London on the 19th of December 1851.