102 
THE ESSEX NATURALIST. 
as successor to the Rev. Nathaniel Phillips. Cogan was well known and 
famous as a scholar before he came to Walthamstow and founded the 
school which added lustre to his name. The son of a doctor, practising 
at Rothwell, in Northamptonshire, he was born in 1762, his father being 
then 64 years of age, and himself a ripe scholar, he became his little son’s- 
first tutor and made him, before he was six years of age, master of the 
Latin grammar. Under his father’s tuition he apparently remained,, 
for it is recorded that his only school experience embraced but a period of 
six months spent at the academy of the Rev. Samuel Addington, at Market 
Harborough. Before he was eighteen Cogan was a very fine classical 
scholar, expert in Latin and Greek, which latter language he acquired 
by his own exertions, and in later life was recognized as one of the finest 
Greek scholars of the age. His early religious training naturally turned 
his thoughts to the ministry, and with that end in view he entered the 
Theological Academy at Daventry in 1780, where, after three years as a 
student, he continued other three as an assistant tutor, a position for which 
his scholarship and attainments eminently fitted him. Entering the 
ministry in 1787 he had charge of a Presbyterian congregation at Ciren¬ 
cester, in Gloucestershire. Three years afterwards he married Mary 
Atchison, of Weedon, and started a school at Ware, which, in 1791, he 
removed to Enfield, and afterwards to Cheshunt, and then, in 1802, after 
having ministered to his Walthamstow congregation for nearly a year, 
he decided to take up his abode in the parish and acquired a hundred years’ 
lease of this house, and for purposes of his school built two large rooms- 
over the coach house and stables, in one of which we now are. Mr. Solly 
sent his sons to the school, and to one of them, Henry, we are indebted for 
the best account of the establishment, recorded in his very interesting 
autobiography, in two volumes, entitled “ These Eighty Years.” The 
school was unsectarian and the sons of wealthy parents of all creeds re¬ 
ceived their education here ; the success of Cogan as a schoolmaster is 
marvellous, for it is astonishing how frequently the Admission Registers 
of the University Colleges of the period of the school’s existence record 
the entrance of students as from Dr. Cogan’s. 
Cogan resigned the pastorate of the Marsh Street Meeting House in 
1816, and from then until his retirement on 1828, at the age of 66, he 
devoted himself to his scholastic duties. Many who afterwards achieved 
fame received their education at Dr. Cogan’s, prominent among whom 
are Travers, Mackmurdo and Solly as surgeons, Sharpe the Egyptologist, 
Russell Gurney, Recorder of London, and Nightingale, the father of Flor¬ 
ence Nightingale ; but the name above others that will always be insepar¬ 
ably associated with the school is the name of Benjamin Disraeli. Wilfrid. 
Meynell, one of his biographers, says that “ If Waterloo was won on the 
playing fields of Eton, Disraeli reached Westminster and the Cabinet 
by way of Walthamstow.” I need not dwell upon the career of this brilliant 
politician and statesman, it is doubtless well known to you, but perhaps 
not so well known are his novels in which, thinly-disguised, he makes more 
than one reference to his school life in Walthamstow. 
Upon his retirement in 1828 Dr. Cogan, at the request of his old pupils, 
sat for his portrait to T. Phillips, R.A., which, after exhibition in the Royal 
Academy, was presented to him at a dinner at the Albion Tavern in Alders- 
