Page:Lancashire Legends, Traditions, Pageants, Sports, Etc., with an Appendix Containing a Rare Tract.djvu/34

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Memoir of John Harland.
xxvii

a member of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire; to whose Transactions he contributed some interesting papers, and presented to their library a valuable series of antiquarian cuttings from the Manchester Guardian. The Rosicrucians also enrolled him as one of their earliest members. For several years he acted as Secretary to the order, and edited for this society Edmonde Dudlay's "Tree of the Commonwealth," written by the author when under sentence of death for high treason. In a scrap-book entitled The Manchester Olio, now in the Chetham Library, Mr Harland included the transactions of this useful body, amongst a vast mass of other matter, but he has unfortunately omitted to particularise his own contributions. He was never a member of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, although he contributed an excellent biographical notice of his friend, the late John Just, of Bury, to volume xi. of their Memoirs. To Notes and Queries Mr Harland was an occasional contributor; he supplied most of the articles relating to Lancashire to Chambers's "Book of Days;" of which his accounts of "John Shaw's Club," and the "Rev. Joshua Brookes," may be particularised. He supplied an account of the "Find of six thousand silver pennies at Eccles" to the Reliquary; and amongst other papers contributed to that journal may be noticed "an admirable contribution under the signature 'Crux' on 'Local and other Names and Words.'" When Country Words was established he was ready with his help; he contributed several curious papers under the nom de plume of "Monkbarns," and his essays on our Folk-speech, under the signature "Jonathan Oldbuck," attest both the fluency of his pen, and the extent and accuracy of his information. In 1851 he published a series of "Ancient Charters and other Muniments of the