Now that I am back in London, I have been able to answer the question which had been perplexing me as to why Lord George Cavendish, the early nineteenth-century owner of Burlington House, was educated in Hackney.   The answer is that he, along with a number of other children of the Whig political élite, was sent to Newcome’s School in Hackney, where Henry Newcome, the headmaster who gave the school its name, was a noncomformist minister known for his Whig principles, whilst Hackney was known for its healthy green fields.   From 1756 to 1779 the  headmaster was Peter Newcome, a Fellow of Queens’ College, Cambridge and of the Royal Society, and an expert on earthquakes.   Pupils were taught Latin, French and natural sciences, as well as drawing and dancing;  they went on excursions to study natural history;  played football and cricket (there was a cricket pitch next to the school);  and every three years they performed a Shakespeare play.   During the 1780s, one of the masters was Coleridge’s older brother.