In the years 1818 and 1845 the full moon fell on Easter Day, having been particularly directed to fall before it in the act for the change of style, and in the English missals and prayer-books of all time: perhaps it would be more correct to say that Easter Day was directed to fall after the full moon; 'but the principle is the same.' No explanation was given in 1818, but Easter was kept by the tables, in defiance of the rule, and of several protests. A chronological panic was beginning in December 1844, which was stopped by the Times newspaper printing extracts from an article of mine in the Companion to the Almanac for 1845, which had then just appeared. No one had guessed the true reason, which is that the thing called the moon in the Gregorian Calendar is not the moon of the heavens, but a fictitious imitation put wrong on purpose, as will presently appear, partly to keep Easter out of the way of the Jews' Passover, partly for convenience of calculation. The apparent error happens but rarely; and all the work will perhaps have to be gone over next time. I now give two bits of paradox.
Some theologians were angry at this explanation. A review called the Christian Observer (of which Christianity I do not know) got up a crushing article against me. I did not look at it, feeling sure that an article on such a subject which appeared on January 1, 1845, against a publication made in December 1844, must be a second-hand job. But some years afterwards (Sept. 10, 1850), the reviews, &c. having been just placed at the disposal of readers in the old reading-room of the Museum, I made a tour of inspection, came upon my critic on his perch, and took a look at him. I was very glad to remember this, for, though expecting only second-hand, yet even of this there is good and bad; and I expected to find some hints in the good second-hand of a respectable clerical publication. I read on, therefore, attentively, but not long: I soon came to the information that some additions to Delambre's statement of the rule for finding Easter, belonging to distant years, had been made by Sir Harris Nicolas! Now as I myself furnished my friend Sir H. N. with Delambre's digest of Clavius's rule, which I translated out of algebra into common language for the purpose, I was pretty sure this was the ignorant reading of a person to whom Sir H. N. was the highest arithmetical authority on the subject. A person pretending to chronology, without being able to distinguish the historical points—so clearly as they stand out—in which Sir H. N. speaks with authority, from the arithmetical points of pure reckoning on which he does not pretend to do more than directly repeat others,
