Henry Luttrell

Henry Luttrell (c. 1765 – 19 December 1851) was an English politician, wit and writer of society verse. He was the illegitimate son of Henry Lawes Luttrell, 2nd Earl of Carhampton, Tory MP and career soldier. Henry Luttrell secured a seat in the Irish House of Commons for Clonmines 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 London and in Paris he was a frequent dinner-table companion of Thomas Moore, Ireland's national bard, an hagiographer of United Irishmen whose insurrection in 1798 Luttrell's father, as Commander-in-Chief, Ireland, had vigorously suppressed. Through Moore, he was also introduced to the Whig grandees Lord Lansdowne and Lord John Russell. 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."