ric-a-brac_ and of
antiquity awoke in me an interest allied to passion or awe, for which
there was no parallel among others of my age. This was, I believe, the
old spirit which had come down through the ages into my blood--the spirit
which inspired Leland the _Flos Grammaticorum_, and after him John
Leland, the antiquary of King Henry VIII., and Chrs. (Charles) Leland,
who was secretary of the Society of Antiquaries in the time of Charles I.
Let me hereby inform those who think that "Chrs." means Christopher, that
there has been a Charles in the family since time immemorial, alternated
with an Oliver since the days of Cromwell.

John Leyland, an Englishman, now living, who is a deep and sagacious
scholar, and the author of the "Antiquities of the Town of Halifax" (a
very clever work), declares that for _four hundred years_ there has not
been a generation in which some Leland (or Leyland) of the old Bussli de
Leland stock has not written a work on antiquity or allied to
antiquarianism, though in one case it is a translation of Demosthenes,
and in another a work on Deistical Writers. He traces the connection
with his own family of the Henry Leland, my ancestor, a rather prominent
political Puritan character in his time, who first went to America in
1636, and acquired land which my grandfather still owned. It was very
extensive.

There is a De la Laund in the roll of Battle Abbey, {13} but John says
our progenitor was _De Bussli_, who came over with the Conqueror, ravaged
all Yorkshire, killing 100,000 men, and who also burned up, perhaps
alive, the 1,000 Jews in the Tower of York. For these eminent services
to the state he was rewarded with the manor of Leyland, from which he
took his name. The very first _complete_ genealogical register of any
American family ever published was that of the Leland family, by Judge
Leland, of Roxbury, Mass. (but for which he was really chiefly indebted
to another of the name), in which it is shown that Henry Leland had had
in 1847 fifteen thousand descendants in America. In regard to which I am
honoured with a membership in the Massachusetts Genealogical Society. The
crest of Bussli and the rest of us is a raven or crow transfixed by an
arrow, with a motto which I dearly love. It is _Cui debeo_, _fidus_.
Very apropos of this crow or raven is the following: Heinrich Heine, in
his "Germany" (vol. ii. p. 211, Heinemann's edition), compares the same
to priests "whose pious croaking is