LUTSK (Polish, Luck), a town of southern Russia, in the government of Volhynia, on the Styr, 51 m. by rail N.W. of Kovel. Pop. (1900) 17,701. It is supposed to have been founded in the 7th century; in the 11th century it was known as Luchesk, and was the chief town of an independent principality. In the 15th century it was the seat of a bishop and became wealthy, but during the wars between Russia and Poland in the second half of the 16th century, and especially after the extermination of its 40,000 inhabitants, it lost its importance. In 1791 it was taken by Russia. Its inhabitants, many of them Jews, live mainly by shipping goods on the Styr. Among its buildings is a 16th-century castle. Lutsk is the seat of a Roman Catholic bishop.
LUTTERWORTH, a market town in the Harborough parliamentary division of Leicestershire, England; 90 m. N.N.W. from London by the Great Central railway. Pop. (1901) 1734. It lies in a pleasant undulating country on the small river Swift, an affluent of the Avon. The church of St Mary is a fine building, mainly Decorated and Perpendicular, wherein are preserved relics of John Wycliffe, who was rector here from 1374 until his death in 1384. The exhumation and burning of his body in 1428, when the ashes were cast into the Swift, gave rise to the saying that their distribution by the river to the ocean resembled that of Wycliffe’s doctrines over the world. Wycliffe is further commemorated by a modern obelisk in the town. Trade is principally agricultural.
LUTTRELL, HENRY (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. 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.
LÜTTRINGHAUSEN, a town of Germany, in the Prussian Rhine province, 6 m. S.E. of Elberfeld by rail. Pop. (1905) 11,829. It is the seat of various iron and other metal industries, and has cloth and calico mills.
LÜTZEN, a town in Prussian Saxony, in the circle of Merseburg (pop. in 1905, 3981), chiefly famous as the scene of a great battle fought on the 6/16th of November 1632 between the Swedes, under King Gustavus Adolphus, and the Imperialists, under Wallenstein. On the 5/15th November, Gustavus, with some 20,000 men, advanced from Naumburg on the Saale to meet a contingent of his German allies at Grimma, S.E. of Leipzig, but becoming aware of the presence of Wallenstein’s army near Lützen, and that it had been weakened by a large detachment sent away under Pappenheim towards Halle, he turned towards Lützen. Wallenstein’s posts at Weissenfels and Rippach prevented him from fighting his main battle the same evening, and the Swedes went into camp near Rippach, a little more than an hour’s march from Lützen.