Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 42.djvu/19

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Ogden
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Ogden


which he was ejected by the Uniformity Act of 1662. During the whole of his ministry he kept a boarding school.

He did not at once continue his ministry, and was an occasional communicant, though not a 'fixed member,' of the established church. Till the Five Mile Act came into force, 25 March 1666, he kept on his school at Mackworth. He then went into Yorkshire, but returned and had a flourishing school at Derby. Under the indulgence of 1672 he took out a license on 8 May as a presbyterian teacher in the house of Thomas Saunders, at Little Ireton, Derbyshire. In 1085 the master of the Derby grammar school began a suit against him for competing with his school; Ogden took the case to the court of arches, and spent 100l. on it, urging that there was room for two schools; he lost his case in 1686. Sir John Gell of Hopton, Derbyshire, at once put him into the Wirksworth grammar school, of which he remained master till his death. After the Toleration Act, 1689, he preached regularly to nonconformist congregations. He was seized with paralysis in the pulpit, and died on 25 May 1697, 'aged upward of seventy; 'he was buried on 27 May in Wirksworth Church. He married a daughter of Burnet, perpetual curate of Oldham. Samuel Ogden, D.D. [q. v.], was his great-grandson.

Ogden was a good hebraist, conversed in Greek with 'the pretended archbishop of Samos,' and wrote Latin verse in his old age. He delighted in mathematics, and maintained that 'very few good mathematicians were lewd and scandalous.' He was versed also in physics, and an excellent practical botanist, and was fond of music. He seems to have published nothing except, perhaps, a political pamphlet which he wrote at the time of the Rye-house plot, but of which no copy is known to be extant; he left manuscript treatises on predestination and the intermediate state.

[Calamy's Account, 1713, pp. 189 seq., and Continuation, 1727, i. 234 (the certificates of his augmentation, ordination, approbation, and license are given in full, a nearly unique collection); Minute-Book of Wirksworth Classis, in Journal of Derbyshire Archæol. and Nat. Hist. Soc. January 1880. pp. 174 seq.]

OGDEN, SAMUEL (1716–1778), popular preacher, born at Manchester on 28 July 1716, was the only son of Thomas Ogden, a dyer of Manchester, who died in 1766, aged 75, leaving a widow, who lived to be eighty-five. Ogden erected in the collegiate church of Manchester, to the memory of his father, a marble tablet with an inscription in Latin. He was educated at Manchester school, and admitted at King's College, Cambridge, as 'poor scholar' in March 1733, but 'very happily escaped,' in August 1736, to St. John's College, with the prospect of enjoying a Manchester exhibition. He graduated B.A. in January 1737-8, M.A. 1741, B.D. 1748, and D.D. 1753; was elected a fellow of St. John's College on the Ashton foundation on 25 March 1739-40, became senior fellow on 22 Feb. 1758, and remained in that position until 1768. He was incorporated at Oxford on 11 July 1758. In June 1740 he was ordained deacon in the English church by the Bishop of Chester, and was advanced to the priesthood by the Bishop of Lincoln in November 1741. From that date until 1747 he held the curacy of Coley in Halifax, and he was master of the free school at Halifax, communicating to his pupils 'his own exact grammatical mode of institution,' from 1744 until March 1753, when he returned to Cambridge, although he retained the curacy at Eland, in his old parish, down to 1762.

Ogden accepted the sequestration of the round church of the Holy Sepulchre at Cambridge, and preached there for about eighteen years to crowded congregations, consisting mostly of members of the university. He performed his exercise for 'D.D.' against John Green [q. v.], afterwards bishop of Lincoln, in the presence of the Duke of Newcastle, the chancellor of the university, who was much gratified at the contest of intellect, and conferred on him, in 1754, the vicarage of Damerham in Wiltshire, which was tenable with his fellowship. The duke would have bestowed still further preferment upon him, but Ogden did not prove a 'produceable man; for he was singularly uncouth in his manner, and spoke his mind very freely upon all occasions.' In 1764 he was appointed to the Woodwardian professorship of geology at Cambridge, and held it until his death in 1778. He resigned the living of Damerham in 1766 in favour of the Rev. Charles Haynes, who had been promised by the lord chancellor the rectory of Stansfield in Suffolk. From that year until 1778 Ogden held the college living of Lawford in Essex, with the rectory of Stansfield. Gunning gives an amusing specimen of the letters which he used to indite to the owners of valuable preferment whenever any piece of patronage fell vacant; but his efforts to secure promotion were unsuccessful. He was a candidate for the mastership of St. John's College in 1765 and in 1775, but on the latter occasion only polled three votes.

Ogden preached at Cambridge to the last