Lawrence, James

James Henry Lawrence, miscellaneous writer, was educated at Eton, where he was Montem poet in 1790, and afterwards in Germany. A precocious author, he produced numerous poem and essays in English, German, and French. In 1808 Lawrence, happening to be in France with his father, was arrested, along with the other English residents and tourists, and detained for several years at Verdun. Having eventually effected his escape by passing himself off for a German, he published in London A Picture of Verdun, or the English detained in France, 2 vols., 1810, a book of real value for the picture it gives of the deportment of an English colony, mostly consisting of idle and fashionable people, in peculiar and almost unprecedented circumstances. Having been made, as he asserted, a knight of Malta, he assumed the title of Sir James Lawrence, and was frequently known as the Chevalier Lawrence. In 1828 he brought together most of his early writings, with others of a similar description, in a collection entitled The Etonian out of Bounds, and in 1824 he published a book of some value On the Nobility of the British Gentry. He died unmarried was interred with his father in the burying-ground of St. John's Wood Chapel.

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