Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 5.djvu/293

 128. V. Nov., 1919.]

NOTES AND QUERIES.

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and after passing from Cirencester to Ware, Enfield, and Cheshunt, he settled in 1801 at Walthamstow as a minister and a school- master. He took Higham Hall, and it soon became an important boarding school, with a fins staff and a remarkably wide curricu- lum, which was supplemented with ample
 * spor,';s and a strict though undenominational

training in religion. The enterprise was a great success and Cogan in 1828 retired from ictive service with savings amounting to

ao,oooz.

DISRAELI'S SCHOOL.

At this school were educated Disraeli, Busk of the Chancery Bar, Russell Gurney, /Samuel Sharpe, and many other prominent men, including Paget, the remarkable Thames Police magistrate = " cadi," Richard and Harry Green of the historic Blackwall Yard ,<f Alexander Ellis, the plionetician, Miss Florence Nightingale's father, &c. Benjamin Disraeli, according to his own account, was there for four years from the age of 13 ; and he says : "I learnt, or rather 'read, a great deal in these years." Ben- jamin's father, Isaac, had made Cogan' s -.acquaintance accidentally and had been attracted by him ; and Benjamin himself gives a very flattering description of Cogan as a teacher. But the comment of Disraeli's biographer, Mr. Monypenny, is that : "In later years the memory of Higham Hall seems to have absorbed many of the recol- lections both of what preceded and what followed on his education " ; and Mr. Mony- penny ventures to doubt whether Disraeli stayed at the Higham Hall School so long as four years. A story is given that Disraeli accompanied the Anglican pupils to St. Mary's Church instead of the Meeting House in Marsh Street with which Cogan, then a Unitarian, was connected. The Anglican service being long and the boys generally very late for their dinner, Disraeli threw out the suggestion that they had better all become Unitarians, for. the term of their school life, at any rate. Cogan seems to have had no particular fondness for his very self-conscious pupil. Mr. W. P. Courtney mentions that Cogan used to say "I don't like D'Israeli : I never could get him to understand the subjunctive." Disraeli often revisited Walthamstow as he did every place associated with his youth, his father's vagaries, and his family's descent and he loved to talk with Mrs. Cogan. She seems to have understood him vastly well and to have been otherwise a woman of character. .JU one of his visits he affectedly groaned at |

the boredom of " a late dinner and dressing for the opera." Mrs. Cogan ejaculated " Don't talk such nonsense, Disraeli ; you know you would not like to live any other life."

Cogan died at Higham Hill on June 21, 1855, and was interred in a vault in the burial-ground at The Gravel Pit Chapel, Hackney, which contained his wife's remains, she having died on Dec. 1, 1850, at the age of 81. Me.

" TBIBION," A FRENCH NEOLOGISM. In accordance with Amphibia (or Amphibium) a new term in French has just been sug- gested by M. H. de Varigny in the ' Journal des Debats ' du 5 Oct. 1919, Supplement, p. 4, ' Revue des Sciences '), where he fitly observes : " Nous etions deja Amphibies : mais depuis la conquete de Fair nous voici tribions." May not this new scientific description of " man " as a tribion perhaps deserve to be admitted and added in future to the supplement volume of our great English Thesaurus of the New Dictionary as well ? H. K.

" SPIDOM^TRE." In the exciting novel of Pierre Benoit, ' Koenigsmark,' I note on p. 277 the word spidometre, with the evident meaning of speedometer. This is the first time I have seen this curious French neologism. DE V. PAYEN-PAYNE.

CHARLES LAMB AND HIS EMPLOYERS AT THE EAST INDIA HOUSE. In the famous essay ' The Superannuated Man ' Lamb states that his employers were " the house of Baldero, Merryweather, Bosanquet & Lacy."

Mr. N. L. Hallward, in his notes to the edition of the ' Essays ' published in 1900, states that all the names are fictitious ; and Mr. E. V. Lucas in his edition likewise says these names were feigned ones. I have just met with, in an old Dublin Directory published by W. Wilson in 1801, a list of the * Directors and Officers of the East India Company.' In this list I find that Jacob Bosanquet of Broxbourn was a director and a member of the Treasury Committee. Nowy as Lamb was employed in the accoun- tants' department, he would doubtless have direct intercourse with this director who served on the above committee.

It may be of interest to Lamb students to know that at least one of the names used by him was authentic.

ARTHUR W. WATERS.