HENRY

See also:

• HENRY LUTTRELL (c. 1765–1851)

LUTTRELL (c. 1765–1851)  , English wit and writer of society verse; was the illegitimate son of Henry Lawes Luttrell, 2nd earl of Carhampton (1743–1821), a grandson of Colonel Henry Luttrell (c . 16J5–1717), 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 182o 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 .