PUBLICATIONS

Zuisenji, Kamakura

‘The Liturgy of Jewish Humanism’: M.A. dissertation, University College, Dublin, 1970. Convergence of Celtic & biblical myth in Bernard Malamud.

‘Enigma of Killeshin’, Nationalist & Leinster Times, Carlow, 21^st May 1971. Celtic myth & Christian ritual.

‘The Importance of Nothing’, Irish Times, 4^th March, 1972. Emptiness and epiphany in A Passage to India.

‘The Problem of Tiberius’, Irish Times, 17^th May 1972. Personality as history.

‘Dear Hermann Hesse...’, Irish Times, 15^th July 1972. Loss as gain on the quest.

‘In Search of Tír na n-Óg’, Irish Times, 13^th September 1972. Lafcadio Hearn in Dublin & Tokyo.

‘In the Heart of Japan’, Irish Times, 23^rd August 1973. Zen gardens in Kyoto.

‘Dream to Reality’, Irish Times, 29^th April 1976. W. B. Yeats & Japan.

‘Kyoto and the Origins of English Romanticism’, 人文論集 (‘Studies in the Humanities’), Shizuoka University, XXIX (1978). ‘William Temple..., among other successes, arranged the marriage of the prince of Orange, a personal friend, to the heir to the English throne, ...and...retired...to his garden. This was near Farnham in Surrey..., where his inscription deus nobis hæc otia fecit still stands over the door and where in his essay “Upon the Gardens of Epicurus” he elaborated his considered philosophy of life... Epicurus taught in a garden. The garden was the teaching. “Neither to disquiet life with the fears of death, nor death with the desires of life; but in both, and in all things else, to follow nature”...
‘Having given his specifications for the ideal garden, ...he goes on:
‘Among us, the chief beauty of building and planting is placed chiefly in certain proportions, symmetries or uniformities...
The Chineses scorn this way of planting... Their greatest reach of imagination is...in...figures...without any order that shall be easily observed; and, though we have hardly any notion of this kind of beauty, yet they have a particular word to describe it...
‘This passage has been described by an eminent historian of ideas as ...“the thin edge of the wedge of romanticism”...
‘This being so, it is worth establishing Temple’s source. The word he gives for irregular design is sharawadgi. “Chinese scholars”, says the OED, “agree that it cannot belong to that language”...
‘In 1934 E. V. Gatenby...suggested to the Times Literary Supplement that sharawadgi was the Japanese sorowadgi...asymmetry...
‘One difficulty remains: or seems to. Temple spoke...of the Chinese. But to the later seventeenth century, this would have seemed a very small matter indeed. The “Indies” still covered most of Asia, and sometimes part of America as well, and a visitor to Temple’s house thought of Japan indifferently as part of India or of China. Temple himself, in the same essay, makes the same equation: “Whoever observes the work upon the best India gowns, or the painting upon their best skreens or purcellans, will find that their beauty is all of this kind, that is, without order”.
‘From here the steps are simple. Temple was accredited to the one country in Europe that still traded with Japan. Once a year the Dutch left Nagasaki and travelled upcountry, stopping at Kyoto along the way... Engelbert Kaempfer went with them, and...says it was a custom amounting almost to law that they were brought to see the temples. And one of them was “just on the edge of a steep hill, planted with trees and bushes in an irregular but agreeable manner”...
One of Addison’s essays is now agreed to be the direct source of the new English garden. And a crucial passage in it is a paraphrase of Temple. Writers who have given us an account of China tell us the inhabitants of that country laugh at the plantations of our Europeans, which are laid out by the rule and line... They choose rather to...conceal the art by which they direct themselves. They have a word it seems in their language, by which they express the particular beauty of a plantation that thus strikes the imagination at first sight’.

‘Intellectual Origins of the English Landscape Garden’: Ph.D. dissertation, University College Dublin, 1980-86. The transmission of sharawadgi by William Temple, its transformation into Romantic aesthetics by Joseph Addison & the centuries-long suppression of the process through the influence of Alexander Pope: findings promulgated in subsequent conference papers and published in journal articles; in book form 1999.

‘Swift’s Mentor, Japan and the Origins of Romanticism’, 1989: paper presented to IASIL international conference, Kobe; published 1990.

‘Swift’s Mentor, Japan and the Origins of Romanticism’, The Harp, V (1990): ‘If I were to say to you that the European romantic movement began here in Japan, you might be forgiven for imagining that I spoke in riddles. Yet I hope by the time I finish to have convinced you that there is a sense in which this is quite literally true.
‘Let us first of all recollect what we know of the origins of romanticism. Over half a century ago the eminent historian of ideas A. O. Lovejoy demonstrated that the first of the romantic arts, and the source of all the others, was the English landscape garden. And this began when Joseph Addison advocated a natural, as opposed to the current mathematical style: in support of which he instanced the practice of the “Chineses”. Now Addison’s description of the Chinese garden, as Lovejoy has also pointed out, is a paraphrase of that by Sir William Temple. Here is what Temple said: “...They say the sharawadgi is fine or is admirable, or any such expression of esteem”...
‘We have now, with the help of Lovejoy, established two facts: One, that the English landscape garden was the first of the romantic arts; and Two, that its prototype was Temple’s account of his “Chineses”. In order to complete our story, two questions remain: First, what was Temple’s source? And second, who was Temple?
‘This second question is of greater relevance than may appear at first sight. Temple does not merely pass on a piece of exotic information; he confers value upon it. He devalues the western, regular garden in the face of the eastern, irregular one. He realises the meaning of what he has seen; and if you think of the history of the western garden, stretching back from England through France and Italy and Spain, ultimately to the irrigation gardens of Egypt and Mesopotamia, always essentially geometrical, you will see that in Temple’s insight there is a fundamental turning-point in aesthetic thought.
‘So again I ask: who was Temple?...
‘Temple was a man in whose life two factors were evenly balanced: philosophy and politics, leisure and responsibility – in classical parlance, otium and negotium... Temple...would have earned his place in history by the quality of his negotiations alone: through these he had a distinct role in the development of democratic institutions. But his passion for retirement remained equally powerful; and it was in deference to this that he retreated, declining the offer of the secretaryship of state..., to the...last of his gardens, at Moor Park in Surrey. It’s still there: you can see it. You go down a laneway between a long low wooded hill on the left and the valley of a small stream on the right, and you come upon his house... His coat of arms still holds its place over the door; and beneath it is the characteristic, Vergilian motto: deus nobis hæc otia fecit...
‘I have now attempted to answer one of the two questions I proposed at the beginning: who was Temple? It remains to examine the other: what was his source?
‘The most important clue that we are given is his mysterious incantation of sharawadgi. Attempts to track it to its origin, however, have not been notably successful. The standard treatment of the subject, and one quoted almost by rote in works dealing with it, is that by the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner, in collaboration with Susan Lang. Pevsner’s distinction elsewhere, it must be presumed, has given his performance here a cachet it does not deserve. Pevsner and Lang begin with the statement of the Oxford English Dictionary that the word is “of unknown origin”: a statement which they regard as “rather defeatist”. Instead they adduce two supposed “Chinese” interpretations; but these turn out not to be Chinese at all. They are simply attempts to fit Chinese characters to Temple’s sound: they do not occur, in these combinations, in the Chinese language... Lang and Pevsner, recognising this, fall back on the proposal that Temple, perhaps with some smattering of Chinese syllables, made up the word himself. This is not defeatist, I suppose; it is more like desperation.
‘Despair, however, is unnecessary. Hidden away in a corner of their essay, and passed over in a fashion exceedingly abrupt, is mention of an actual word, in a real language, that does correspond to sharawadgi. In 1931, and again in 1934, E. V. Gatenby, an English teacher at Fukushima, suggested that the word might be, not Chinese, but the Japanese sorowaji, “not being regular”...
‘Temple states that he had had his information about the gardens of the “Chineses” from men who had “lived much” among them. If these in fact were Japanese, his source immediately suggests itself. Temple was accredited to the one country in Europe then engaged in trade with Japan; and since he negotiated at Amsterdam with the Dutch East India Company, which managed that trade through Djakarta, it is evident that he could have, and very likely did, come into contact with men who had set foot in this country’.

‘The Japanese Garden and the Mystery of Swift’: paper presented to IASIL world conference, Kyoto, 1990; published 1996.

‘Chiaroscuro: The Infernal Image of William Temple’, Éire, XI (1991): ‘“Had Temple been brought before Dante’s infernal tribunal, he would...perhaps have been placed in the dark vestibule next to the shade of that inglorious pontiff... Che fece per viltate il gran rifiuto’. What is alluded to here is that Temple repeatedly refused the office of secretary of state, first under Charles II and finally under William III. Yet for these refusals he had ample justification... He had woven one after another – to use Macaulay’s own phrase – “masterpiece of diplomacy”, only to have it unravelled by – Macaulay’s phrase again – the “perfidious levity” of Charles. When he retired, humiliated and enraged, from Charles’ service, he sent word to him that he would “never meddle any more with public affairs”; and when his friend the Prince of Orange, on becoming king, offered him cabinet office again, he felt himself bound by his earlier promise... The gran rifiuto is a mirage.
‘What Temple could do, moreover, he did. The “real hero”, writes his biographer Woodbridge, of those memoirs of which Macaulay speaks with such scorn is “William Prince of Orange”... And this is very strange. Because the core of Macaulay’s great narrative, too, is apotheosis of William... Macaulay’s political vision, then, is Temple’s, substantiated by hindsight... What suggests itself...is the image of the lawyer who engages in a case in which he does not believe: of a throwing up of hands in chambers and a measured advocacy in court. And the thrust of that advocacy is to be sought in the nature of the advocate and that of the forum in which he pleaded. Macaulay was a Whig: was indeed the leading orator of that party when it carried the reform of parliament; and the essay on Temple appeared in a Whig journal. “I will try my hand on Temple”, he had written to its editor; “...Shaftesbury I shall let alone”. Shaftesbury, the prophet of the Whigs: “Shaftesbury I shall let alone”. Strange reverence, this, for the founder of one’s faith. But the dilemma for the historian of Whiggery is succinctly expounded by Acton: “It is the supreme achievement of Englishmen, and their bequest to the nations; but the patriarchs of the doctrine were the most infamous of men”...
‘Macaulay’s...argument...is this: that Shaftesbury, so deep is the dye of his infamy, is sublime. Dryden’s “great portrait” is invoked, in which he appears as the embodiment of “violent passion, implacable revenge, boldness amounting to temerity”. He is “one of the ‘great wits to madness near allied’”. Play is made with the “audacity of his spirit”, the “fierceness of his malevolent passions”. Here is no squalid political turncoat; here is Satan in Paradise Lost... The darkness is deep; but it serves to accentuate the points of light. The highlights and the shadows coalesce, throwing Shaftesbury into powerful relief, as in the glare and the gloom of some great baroque portrait: chiaroscuro.
‘So impressive, indeed, is the effect that it is almost a pity that it is fiction. Shaftesbury ended his career, not as the splendid demon of Paradise Lost, but as the shifty reprobate of Paradise Regained. To save his head, this “keen and restless spirit” fled to Holland: to the land which, in the days of Temple’s alliance with it, had been his delenda Carthago. And it was Temple, and not Shaftesbury, who negotiated the match between a Dutch prince and an English princess through which his “noble ends”, insofar as he had any, were to be realised’.

‘Anglo-Dutch and Anglo-Irish: The Politics of Romanticism’: paper presented to IASAIL world conference, Leiden, 1991; published 1995.

‘Poor Dick Steele: Catalyst of Romantic Thought’: paper presented to IASIL international conference, Tokyo, 1991; published 1992.

‘The Dublin M.A. of Samuel Johnson: Unlocking the Code of Romanticism’: paper presented to IASIL world conference, Dublin, 1992; published (‘Fashion as Fascism: Swift and the Lost Romantics’) 1994.

‘Poor Dick Steele: Catalyst of Romantic Thought’, The Harp, VII (1992): ‘Steele’s father died when he was still very young, and he was indebted for his education to a warm-hearted aunt who was married to the secretary of the Duke of Ormonde. Through her he went to school in London, where he befriended young Joseph Addison...
‘Steele spent his school holidays in Addison’s home and became the confidant of his father, who expounded to him his ideas on upbringing. “His method”, says Steele, “was to make it the only Pretension to his Children to his Favour to be kind to each other... This turned their Thoughts into an Emulation for the Superiority in kind and tender Affection towards each other... It...created in him the Godlike Pleasure of loving them, because they loved each other”.
‘The value of this eyewitness account, as I perceive it, is that Steele failed to understand what he had seen. Steele, orphaned in early childhood, and with his nose pathetically pressed to the window of family life, could hardly be expected to comprehend its actual dynamics. But when we look at it critically, the overwhelming impression left by the scene that he paints is one of artifice: artifice on the part of the parent, by whom affection was bestowed conditionally, and not as a matter of natural feeling; and artifice on the part of the children, in whom any difference of character or opinion had to be subsumed into a psychological circus...
‘Joseph Addison has left no direct comment as to the feelings his upbringing aroused in him. But indirect evidence does exist, in the form of a pair of early anecdotes. These have been slighted by his biographers; but it must be stated that each of them has a thoroughly respectable provenance.
‘The first was printed when Addison, had he lived, would have been just above sixty. It is contemporary, then, and shows no sign of any ulterior motive: neither local pride nor local prejudice seems involved, though it is ascribed to “the town where he was born”. This is Milston, in the uplands behind Salisbury. There is a small medieval church in a meadow beside a stream, and across the laneway the site of Addison’s birthplace. All around are rolling hills and scattered woodland, so it is very easy to imagine the episode taking place. This is that Addison, fearing punishment for some fault committed at school, ran away across the fields from his parents’ house, and took refuge in a hollow tree, where he lived upon such fruit as he could gather until he was found and brought home.
‘The family left Milston when Addison’s father was appointed Dean of Lichfield. Lichfield today is a gracious Georgian city, spreading out about the three great spires of its cathedral. But its chief place of pilgrimage is modern: it is the square and solid house in which Samuel Johnson was born; and Johnson, as it happens, is the source of our second story. Johnson belonged to the generation immediately after Addison, from whose time his information came: so that once again the anecdote is both contemporary and reliable. This is to the effect that Addison, at school in Lichfield, was the leader of a rebellion against the schoolmaster.
‘We have, then, two pieces of information which are consistent one with the other, and both with the negative reading I have proposed of the fulsome narration of Steele. We have an Addison mistrustful of his family and rebellious against authority. But we are not in the end obliged to rely upon speculation in order to draw these scattered fragments of evidence into a whole. Because, in the year in which the Dean of Lichfield forfeited all future preferment by his opposition to the Prince of Orange, Joseph Addison, in a publicly-printed poem, hailed William as hero, deliverer and king.
‘Of the personal relations that followed, the evidence suggests a lengthy estrangement, followed by ultimate reconciliation. But on the level of principle, neither ever yielded an inch. The Tory dean, to the end of his days, stirred up as much trouble as he possibly could for the Whig bishops who were successively placed over him; while his son’s lifelong adherence to the Whigs led him at last to a secretaryship of state.
‘I have spoken elsewhere of the political ramifications of Addison’s identification with the Anglo-Dutch king; here I wish to stress the psychological. While still at Oxford, Addison established an antithesis between the small natural garden described by Vergil in the Georgics and the artificial elaborations of the current fashion in France. And when he went on to travel in Europe, the contrast was further strengthened and deepened. He repeatedly favoured the natural over the artificial, identifying the first with liberty, as embodied in revolutionary England and the mountain republic of San Marino, and the second with despotism, as observed in the Papal States and the domineering stage-set of Versailles. In all of this, I suggest, we may discern the underlying polarity laid down by his childhood experience: between the closed field of a repressive household and the liberating openness of the natural world to which he made his escape from it...
‘“His essays at their best”, said Virginia Woolf, “preserve the very cadence of easy yet exquisitely modulated conversation...bright, new, various, with the utmost spontaneity”. Spontaneity, indeed, and natural feeling form the matter as well as the manner of Addison’s liberation...
‘This is nowhere more apparent than in his great series of essays on the pleasures of the imagination. Here, writes Walter Jackson Bate, “both mind and emotions” are “completely released from ‘restraint’”. These, notes Clarence Thorpe, are a trusting “not in reason and learning, but in natural response, in instinct, emotion, imagination, and original genius”. And at the heart of this aesthetic of romanticism was his manifesto for the natural garden, in support of which he invoked the practice of the country which was known to him as China.’

‘First Morning in Japan’ (Tokyo: Taishukan, 1993). ‘It was my first morning in Japan. I had landed, late, the night before in a blinding rainstorm, and, as I came in by bus from Haneda, giant buildings sped by through the curtains of rain, flashing neon signals of which I understood nothing at all. No human being was in sight; and the lonely, flickering canyons seemed to me like some poet’s image of hell.
‘It was not at all what I had expected. Someone had sent me a postcard of Itsukushima, its graceful gateway floating like some otherworldly vision over the waters, and this had remained my abiding impression of Japan. Somehow, somewhere, something had gone wrong.
‘Now it was morning. Light, and a good night’s sleep, had transformed the world. My curiosity had returned; and I determined that, however inhuman and alien the city, I would gaze upon its face. I walked down the short street from my hotel to the subway station; and, as I waited for the lights to change, a sight that startled me caught my eye. There, painted on the end of a drum at the entrance to a tiny shrine, was the pattern, in black and white, of the triple comma: the mitsudomoe. ‘One week earlier, I had still been at work in a newspaper office in downtown Dublin. Beside it, in a college library, is a book of the Christian gospels, carefully and beautifully decorated some twelve hundred years ago. And one of its pages, representing the endless energy of the spirit of life, is covered with swirl after swirl of the mitsudomoe.
‘I stopped and gazed, held my breath and gazed again while the lights changed back and forth several times. Tokyo was still a mystery to me. But it was no longer alien’.

‘Edmund Burke and Sharawadgi: The Japanese Origin of a Metaphor’: paper presented to IASIL international conference, Tokyo, 1993; published 1994.

‘Fashion as Fascism: Swift and the Lost Romantics’, Éire, XIV (1994): ‘It was not until the middle of the nineteenth century, with the dramatic discovery, in the outhouse of a Sussex farm, of a great cache of Pope’s original texts, that the truth came to light. Here it was found that the bulk of the Addison correspondence was forged – cobbled together out of letters to others – and the rest of it suspect.
‘And that, one might think, was the end of the story. The truth had appeared; it was bound to prevail. So one might think; but one would be mistaken... There are fashions in truth; there are fashions in reality; there are fashions in scholarship. In the world of the intellect, fashion takes on the lineaments of fascism. It creates a climate of opinion in which the truth cannot be told.
‘When Lytton Strachey, in 1918, published Eminent Victorians, he coincided with a more than ordinary fashion. He “struck”, wrote Cyril Connolly, “the note of ridicule which the whole war-weary generation wanted to hear”... Working within the sphere of influence of Freud, on whom his brother James was to become a leading authority, he probed beneath the public personae of a churchman, a general, an educationalist and a reformer, who might be taken as representative of Victorian values, to display the division and self-doubt beneath...
‘When Bonamy Dobrée, seven years later, published a lengthy essay in which he described Joseph Addison as “The First Victorian”, he was clearly influenced by Strachey... To be Victorian, for Dobrée, is to pretend to superior virtue. In Addison’s case, this took the form of outward modesty cloaking an inward thirst for power. Friendship on equal terms, therefore, was impossible to him. And so he created a small circle over whom he could rule without question...
‘The type of the divided character is an ancient and abiding one: it did not wait for its perception on Strachey or Freud. It was Pope who presented Dobrée with his Addison, portraying him as both moralist and Machiavelli. If Dobrée had shown any understanding of, or desire to understand, the laws of evidence, he would sooner or later have come upon this truth. But he did not do so; what he was looking for was his Victorian, and he found him. What interested him was image, not evidence; fashion, not fact; and in this he has been followed by the later Popeans.
‘George Sherburn, in 1934, in The Early Career of Alexander Pope, proclaimed that “really scholarly editing” was “almost unknown in the Victorian period”. Pope’s editors, he claimed, were “morally expert but bibliographically untrained”, and gives as example the “malicious comment of Elwin and Courthope” on a line in one of his poems. He gets the line number wrong; so much for trained bibliography. But in his overall account of the facts, he moves from inaccuracy to misrepresentation. Elwin and Courthope, though Victorian, were two quite separate people. The comment was made by Elwin on the basis of the evidence then available to him; it was withdrawn by Courthope when an earlier document came to light...
‘There came a point, however, when it became impossible, even for Sherburn, to ignore the truth. This was when he set himself to edit Pope’s letters.
‘Pope had developed an itch to publish his correspondence with Swift, a project which at the time smacked of ludicrous vanity. He therefore had it surreptitiously printed, but blamed the printing upon Swift’s family, with the collusion of Swift himself, whom at the same time he...affects to forgive. “The most audacious hypocrite of fiction”, wrote Leslie Stephen, “pales beside this”. Stephen, however, was another Victorian, branded by Sherburn with the mark of “prejudice”. In his introduction to the correspondence he warns, again, that it ought to be read “without Victorian prejudice”. Yet when he comes to the letters in question, he is forced to admit that the “hypocritical suspicions” that Pope “readily casts” upon Swift’s family are “painful to record”. The “Victorian” truth was inescapable; as its implications ought to have been: that the man who was capable of attributing his own doings to Swift was capable of the same to Addison.
‘One would not think so, however, to read the 1985 life of Pope by Mack. In this, as he boasts the first full-scale biography of the century, he describes Sherburn’s work as “wonderful”, and reproduces, in essence, its account of the dealings of Pope with Addison... Mack prefaces his performance with a complaint that Pope has long enough suffered from “self-righteousness in his commentators”. The imago of the Victorian persists.
‘All this would be largely of biographical interest were it not for its corollary. It was not enough for Pope to attribute his own doings to Addison; he completed the exchange of personalities by claiming Addison’s achievements for his. A year after Addison, in the Spectator, had invented the English landscape garden, Pope, in the Guardian, invented it again. His essay is a tissue of borrowings from Addison and Temple; but he claims to have evolved the concept by himself. That this was so was assumed by Mack, in a detailed study of the subject (1969), in which the claims of Temple and Addison were not considered. He was followed by Morris Brownell, who in his magisterial Alexander Pope and the Arts of Georgian England (1978), went still further. In language that echoes Pope’s slander of Addison, he utters a scornful dismissal of his “vague notions” of Asian prototypes.
‘This, then, despite fleeting glimpses of the truth before and since, remains the orthodox persuasion. So that when people ask me why, if what I have written is true – that the English landscape garden began with an idea from Japan, put forward by Temple and propagated by Addison – why, if this is true, nobody seems to know about it, the simple answer is “Pope”. The more complicated answer is “Pope scholarship”, which is still possessed by the shadow of the Victorian. Until this is exorcised, and witnesses like Swift attended to, Temple and Addison will remain the lost romantics, and one of the great watersheds in western history lie unmapped’.

‘The First Romantic: William Temple’, Eigo-Eibei-Bungaku, XXXIV (1994), 329-39. ‘Penshurst still carries something of the air of a village suspended in time. Fishermen work from its oldworld bridge in silence. A bell clatters the hours from a weatherworn church. Beside it, the gardens of the manor-house have been restored to the simplicity of the Renaissance; while its medieval hall still stands, as when Jonson praised its noble hospitality... But echoes still more compelling inhabit the parkland behind: for here stood the oaktree planted, according to tradition, “at his great birth, where all the Muses met”. All the muses: for Sir Philip Sidney was England’s Renaissance man; and such, in later years, he still appeared to Temple: “a person born capable not only of forming the greatest ideas, but of leaving the noblest examples”. This Renaissance combination of visionary and activist is the key to much that may seem incongruous in Temple. Temple was to realise the alliance with Holland that had been Sidney’s dream, and in the quest for which he had met his heroic death at Zutphen; while Sidney in the Arcadia had created a garden that, like Temple’s, was a retreat from a court in which the visionary was no less compromised than in that of the Restoration.
‘But the palimpsest that was Penshurst was even yet not exhausted. Jonson was followed there by Waller, for whom Sidney was so far the supreme erotic poet of the language “That all we can of love, or high desire, / Seems but the smoke of amorous Sidney’s fire”.
‘Waller’s pilgrimage to Penshurst was to the shrine of Lady Dorothy Sidney, whose image still simpers on its walls as she clasps the rose to which he likened her. His devotion was shared by the young William Temple; and though she was married, in a ceremony which he may have witnessed, when he was eleven years old, it does not seem to have slackened. “I have sent you my picture”, wrote the young woman, another Dorothy, whom he was himself to marry, in that sweetly sardonic tone which is so characteristic of her, “...but pray let it not presume to disturb my Lady Sunderland’s”’.

‘Edmund Burke and Sharawadgi: The Japanese Origin of a Metaphor’, The Harp, IX (1994): ‘Burke followed Addison, and with him Temple and Japan, in his definition of the beautiful. “Our gardens”, he wrote, “if nothing else, declare, we begin to feel that mathematical ideas are not the true measures of beauty”... On the one side, he put beauty, and on the other, he brought back the sublime... Beauty was that which evoked love, the sublime that which induced fear... Burke, then, based himself on Addison, yet differed from him; and the difference is a difference in personal psychology... “I know of nothing sublime”, he wrote, “which is not some modification of power”. It has surprised me that Conor Cruise O’Brien, in his monumental recent study of Burke, should have chosen to dismiss this text as a belated schoolboy exercise; because it appears to me to portray, with the utmost clarity, the issue which Dr. O’Brien has seen as underlying all of Burke’s experience.
‘Burke, after all, was the son of a Catholic mother and a Protestant father, in a society in which to be Catholic was to be by the wayside of contempt, while to be Protestant was to be on the highroad to power: which at the same time, being built over the repression of the majority, was insecure. All of Burke’s efforts in relation to Ireland were an attempt – futile as it transpired – to impress this reality upon myopic Machiavellis like the younger Pitt: whom he once described, in a phrase worthy of Wilde, as “the sublime of mediocrity”. Similarly, he tried to warn George III and his supporters that British rule in America depended, not on legality, but on feeling. If your sovereignty, he told the House of Commons, “and their freedom cannot be reconciled, which will they take?” He was equally concerned that the crushing of the liberties of America would lead, under an ambitious and small-minded king, to a similar fate for England. He feared the same corrupting influence from the oppression of India: though he was no less tireless in asserting what he believed, to the astonishment of many of his contemporaries, to be the inalienable rights of the Indian people. On “Ireland, America, and India”, writes the Marxist political scientist Harold Laski, “he was at every point upon the side of the future”.
‘Then came the French revolution; and, as everybody knows, he opposed it. We can make things easy for ourselves if we suppose that he saw where his principles had been leading him, and reversed course: that, in the current phrase, he turned reactionary. The difficulty with labels, however, is that while they stick easily, they are rarely more than superficial; and the difficulty with this particular label is that to react, as I understand it, is to respond to an event which, by implication, has already occurred. Burke reacted to things which had not yet occurred. Perhaps this is what it means to be an Irish reactionary. Or perhaps there is some other explanation: such as context. No passage in Burke, perhaps, has elicited more mockery than that in which he reads such ominous implication into the mistreatment of the king and queen of France. But a French eyewitness of the invasion of the Tuileries, and the humiliation of the king, wrote: “This is unconstitutional and a very dangerous example”. The writer was a young officer from the provinces. His name was Napoleon Bonaparte.
‘What appealed to Burke in fact was, in Eliot’s phrase, not the pastness of the past but its presence. What had begun as base matter, he believed, could be transmuted by the alchemy of time. Hereditary kingship, which had no doubt started as tyranny, was by now a principle of stability; while the elective monarchy of Poland, however admirable on paper, in practice was a formula for chronic civil war. Aristocracy, likewise, might have begun with the barbarian invasions, but by now served as a restraint upon what we have come to describe as money politics. The commons, meanwhile, served as an energising element, and as a counterforce to either of the other two...
‘Burke believed that a similar balance might have been established in France. Instead, the representation of the third estate had been doubled, swamping the other two, reducing the king to a cipher, and leaving a single, unrestricted, source of power. What had happened in America, in Burke’s view, was altogether different. There, the balanced English system had been reconstituted, with a two-tier congress replacing the houses of parliament, and a powerful president in the position of the king. The French saw it otherwise. For the English, the American was a prodigal son; for the French, a noble savage. For them, the transatlantic state was an altogether new society, set up in the wilderness from first principles. It was an irresistible exercise in Cartesian logic. And this was what worried Burke. He recalled how, on his visits to royalist France, it had been represented to him that the French monarch was a far more glorious sovereign than the English, being free of restrictions. This despotic attitude had simply been transferred, in Burke’s view, to an absolutist assembly.
‘He underlined this with the imagery of the English garden. When Addison adopted the Japanese model of the natural garden, it was as a symbol of the decentralised rule that had been established by the English revolution, and in conscious opposition to the sweeping, ruthless, mathematical approach to nature embodied by Louis XIV in Versailles. The framers of the new constitution Burke now saw as “clearing away as mere rubbish whatever they found, and, like their ornamental gardeners, forming everything into an exact level”. He referred in particular to the plan to abolish the historic provinces, and redivide the country into equal départements. It was boasted that with what he called this “geometrical policy”, all “local ideas should be sunk, and that the people should no longer be Gascons, Picards, Bretons, Normans; but Frenchmen, with one country, one heart, and one Assembly. But instead”, Burke warned “of being all Frenchmen, the greater likelihood is, that the inhabitants of that region will shortly have no country. No man ever was attached by a sense of pride, partiality, or real affections, to a description of square measurement”. Mathematics again. “You have”, he informs the French, “industriously destroyed all the opinions, and prejudices, and as far as in you lay, all the instincts which support government. Therefore the moment any difference arises...you must have recourse to force. Nothing else is left to you; or rather you have left nothing else to yourselves”. And it was in this context that Burke made his most extraordinary prediction, one that in later years made his inflammatory rhetoric seem to glow with the coals of fire of the authentic prophet. “In the weakness of one kind of authority”, he foretold, “and in the fluctuation of all, the officers of an army will remain for some time mutinous and full of faction, until some popular general, who understands the art of conciliating the soldiery, and who possesses the true spirit of command, shall draw the eyes of all men upon himself...” These words were printed fourteen years before the coronation in Notre Dame.’

‘Anglo-Dutch and Anglo-Irish: The Politics of Romanticism’, in The Literature of Politics, The Politics of Literature, 5 vol. (Amsterdam & Atlanta: Rodopi, 1995): ‘Sir William Temple...was...an Anglo-Irishman..., a landlord in Co. Carlow...; but his most obvious claim to fame arises from his dealings with another country. It was as British ambassador to the United Provinces that he forged the first of the series of alliances that were to limit the power of Louis XIV, and negotiated the marriage between the Prince of Orange and the Princess Mary which gave William his claim on the throne of England and so brought about the revolution which made government a mandate extended by the governed. It was a principle that Temple passionately believed in. “The safety and firmness of any frame of government”, he wrote, “may be best judged by the rules of Architecture, which teach us that the Pyramid is of all figures the firmest”...
‘It is of course one of the great ironies of history that that revolution was carried out through the medium of a man who resented bitterly the restrictions that it placed upon him... you have only to think of his great garden over at Het Loo, with its obvious echoes of Versailles, to recall that he had something in him of the arbitrary temper of his enemy Louis. Temple detected this at an early stage, recommending as a motto for him potius inservire patriæ liberæ quam dominari servienti...
‘Temple...intended to bring England back to what he considered its natural alliance with the Netherlands. This alliance he did not think of merely as one of temporary advantage, or the accident of proximity, but of deep-seated affinity. He traces the parallels in language and institutions between the two countries to a common origin: making the Anglo-Saxons, in effect, transplanted Frieslanders. The ancient Batavians, he pointed out, were regarded by the Roman writers as “the most obstinate lovers and defenders of their liberties”. This quality, he goes on, “seems to have continued constant and national among them, ever since that time, and never to have more appeared, than in the rise and constitutions of their present State”...
‘The second of his notable achievements was less deliberate, but it has been no less fundamental... Since this was then the only country in Europe permitted to carry on trade with Japan, and since Temple, in the summer of 1669, visited the directors of the East India Company, which managed that trade, in Harlem, Amsterdam and Leiden, I think we may say, with a fair degree of certainty, that he might have met men who had stood in Japanese gardens...
‘Each of this unusual Anglo-Irishman’s achievements, then, was made possible by his sojourn in the Netherlands, and the influences he received there. And each of them is the prefiguring of a specifically modern idea: the decentralisation of society bodied forth in the English revolution, and the decentralisation of landscape, and ultimately of consciousness, which we describe as romanticism...
‘The person responsible for the achievement in this case...was the unlikely figure (unlikely, that is to say, given current assumptions) of Joseph Addison. And Addison first appears upon the stage, both of history and of literature, as the author of a panegyric on the enthronement of the Anglo-Dutch king and his queen... As Vergil, in the beautiful language of the ninth eclogue, had placed Caesar’s star above the older constellations – Ecce Dionæi processit Cæsaris astrum – so Addison performs a similar service for William and Mary: he is the sun, she the moon...
‘This poem, and its reception, marked the turning-point of his life. His talent as a propagandist was immediately recognised. He was given a scholarship at Oxford, which was followed by a fellowship; he received the patronage of the Whig architects of the revolution settlement...; and through their influence he was awarded a Treasury grant to travel in Europe and prepare himself for public office...
‘At this point the Dutch king died, Addison’s patrons fell from power, and Addison himself wandered, somewhat aimlessly, in the general direction of home. He spent some time in Holland and visited the university of Leiden. A rather lugubrious letter of his has survived, in which he makes a contrast between his own meditations among the anatomical exhibits and a more ebullient friend’s encounters with the fine women of The Hague...
‘Queen Anne had had no great love for her Dutch predecessor: the story goes that she even had the box hedges at Hampton Court rooted up because they reminded her of him. But she had wisdom enough to follow his grand strategy for Europe and contain the ambitions of Louis XIV. It was something the more insular Tories, then as now, found it impossible to comprehend: so that she was obliged to find support among the Whigs. As a result of this, Addison arrived in Dublin as secretary to the Lord Lieutenant. “I...do not at all”, he wrote, “regrette the leaving of England whilst I am going to a place where I shall have the satisfaction and Honour of Dr. Swift’s conversation”. It would be pleasing to be able to assume that it was in the course of conversation with Temple’s former secretary that Addison hit upon the idea of making the Japanese garden, as communicated to Temple in the Netherlands, the prototype of the English one. Intellectual history in that case would have taken on a peculiarly satisfying personal symmetry. I do not think, however, that we can do so. “Where he touched”, observed a Whig historian of Swift, “he scorched”; and few passages are more blistering than that in which Swift attacks Holland precisely on the point of its communications with Japan. You will remember that the most improbable of all students of Leiden university was one Lemuel Gulliver; that he was fluent in Dutch; and that he was therefore able to pass himself off as a native of this country in Japan. There, he appealed to the shogun not to have to trample on the crucifix; whereupon that dignitary “began to doubt whether I were a real Hollander or no; but rather suspected I must be a CHRISTIAN”...
‘No, what happened to Addison in Dublin, the impetus that he encountered there and that changed his life and our history, came to him from his other close Irish friend, Richard Steele. It was in Dublin that Addison same across that strange new publication, the Tatler, recognised Steele’s hand in it from an observation that he himself had once made to him, submitted contributions , was taken into partnership, and, while Swift and his party drove Steele and himself out of office, found in journalism an alternative career and his true vocation...
‘And at the core of this was the paper in which he suggested that the English garden return to nature... So the world we know begins, in the consciousness of two inhabitants of Anglo-Ireland, and through their encounter with the Anglo-Dutch king. The fruit of that encounter was romanticism, which we are now in a position to define: aesthetic manifestation of the English revolution’. ‘Ciaran Murray’s analysis of the influence of Japanese concepts of artlessness in garden architecture makes a powerful case...’ (Joep Leerssen, A. H. van der Weel & Bart Westerweel).

‘The Second Romantic: Joseph Addison’, Eigo-Eibei-Bungaku, XXXV (1995), 417-25: ‘In a corner of the deerpark that lies behind Magdalen College, where the sounds of the street are muted as to the hum of some distant shore, stands the gateway that once formed the entrance to Addison’s garden. Here, through the pietas of his biographer, it has found an appropriate landfall: here, where his liberation began. ‘In the iron of the structure are wrought the initials of Addison and his wife. The A of Addison is bound to and intertwines with the W of Warwick; the flourish of the J of Joseph coincides with that of the C of Charlotte. It is a small signal, but a significant one: the cipher of a man who was neither domineering nor insecure; nor who feared, in the end, the equality of the bedchamber. The complacent modern judgement upon Addison, that love seems to have been “outside his range”, is thus seen to be false...
‘What Addison, then, afforded to his century was not alone a vision but a medium of vision. He stands, says C. S. Lewis, at a “very turning-point” in the history of feeling. It is feeling itself that is his essential criterion; and by its means he breathes into the western garden, formal for centuries, a spirit which will transmute it into its opposite. “What is the Tree”, asks the emperor in his Persian fable, “that bears three hundred and sixty-five Leaves, which are all Black on the one Side, and White on the other?”
‘So too, behind the changes wrought by Addison, shines the light of magnus annus, apocatastasis. And forces other than ubiquity or anonymousness have been at work in its subsequent eclipse. ‘Sir’, said the imperial vizier, when he had provided the expected answer, “Permit me at the same Time to take Notice, that these Leaves represent Your Actions, which carry different faces to your Friends and Enemies, and will always appear Black to those who are resolv’d only to look upon the wrong Side of ’em”’.

‘The Japanese Garden and the Mystery of Swift’, in International Aspects of Irish Literature, ed. Toshi Furomoto et al. (Gerrards Cross: Smythe, 1996): ‘Sir William Temple’s essay on gardens was printed three hundred years ago this year (1990). It was twelve years before the revenge of the samurai of Chūshingura, and fourteen before the defeat of Louis XIV beside the Danube; and I have argued previously that it marks an event more momentous in its way than the symbolic protest against a centralised feudalism in Asia, or the beginning of its real dismantlement in Europe. That it marks a revolution in the way in which we perceive the human mind: that, in Temple’s exaltation of the irregular garden of Japan over the formality of that of his own surroundings, it marks the beginning of that dethronement of reason which we describe as romanticism.
‘I now propose to carry the argument further. That essay of Temple’s went to press in the handwriting of Swift; and I do not believe this circumstance is incidental. I believe that the essay contains the key to the most vexing controversy that swirls around the writings of Swift: the key to a crucial passage in the Tale of a Tub...
‘“In the Proportion that Credulity is a more peaceful Possession of the Mind, than Curiosity, so far preferable is that Wisdom, which converses about the Surface, to that pretended Philosophy which enters into the Depth of Things, and then comes gravely back with Informations and Discoveries, that in the inside they are good for nothing...”
‘There is stated here, then, ironically or otherwise, a preference for surface over depth. Upon which the satirist concludes: “And he, whose Fortunes and Dispositions have placed him in a convenient Station to enjoy the Fruits of this noble Art; He that can with Epicurus content his Ideas with the Films and Images that fly off upon his Senses from the Superficies of Things; Such a Man truly wise, creams off Nature, leaving the Sower and the Dregs, for Philosophy and Reason to lap up. This is the sublime and refined Point of Felicity, called, the Possession of being well deceived; The Serene Peaceful State of being a Fool among Knaves”.
‘To anybody acquainted with the life and writings of Swift’s mentor, this seems obviously to encompass Temple. He had retired to his garden from the undoubted knavery of the Stuart court, quoting the proverb that “a fool knows more in his own house than a wise man in another’s”; he justified this retirement with the precedent of Epicurus; and “Upon the Gardens of Epicurus” is the title that he gave to the historic essay in which he founded romanticism and which is his most intimate autobiography...
‘He has described existence, by implication, as meaningless; and if religion has any intimation of meaning to offer, he has nothing to say about it. His references to the religion of his time and place, in fact, tend to be slighting. He mentions the garden of paradise in passing, adding: “if we believe the Scripture”. He defends Epicurus against the imputation of impiety, putting this down, in part, to the intolerance of the early Christians. He lists the generation of the Roman Epicureans – Horace, Vergil, Lucretius, Caesar – as the greatest recorded in history: that which comes before the birth of Christ. But on this event, and its possible significance, he is utterly silent...
‘We have now found our motive for the satire of Swift..., as a priest in Anglican orders... At the heart of the disputed passage is the word “Superficies”..., ...a key concept in the philosophy of Epicurus... Lucretius in his exposition of the doctrine of the master speaks of simulacra – the eidola of his original: fine atomic particles discharged from the surface – or “Superficies” – of material objects, which form themselves into – Swift’s phrase again – “Films and Images”... And it is this process, Lucretius goes on to inform us, that accounts for the belief in spirits...
‘Swift, then, as I read him, has with fiendish irony taken a characteristic doctrine of Temple’s philosopher and mirrored it back upon Temple himself...
‘Nemesis however was waiting on the irony of Swift. No sooner had the Tale been published than it was described by an outraged reader as “one of the Prophanest Banters upon the Religion of Jesus Christ, as such, that ever yet appeared”; and – ultimate irony – its authorship attributed to Temple. Swift was never afterwards able to shake off the imputation of irreligion...
‘The whole satirical method of the Tale is to reduce religious phenomena to a series of physiological disorders. Swift angrily countered that he was speaking of false religion; but that his method could be applied to all religion was as obvious to his startled contemporaries as it has been to the psychoanalysts to whom he is a hero and a pioneer. This is the materialist reductionism of Epicurus; and it is a remarkable fact that the fundamental allegory of the Tale is of religion as a coat: precisely that analogy of surfaces which he had so satirised in Temple.
‘John Traugott...sees Swift as bringing madness into Temple’s garden... I think he found it there. I think that there the bottom fell out of his world; and that he was never able after to put it together again. Temple had shown him the vista into the abyss; but he could not contemplate it with Temple’s quietism. I sometimes wonder whether, when he tells us that he developed his dizziness – the terrible waves of vertigo that came to him as “a hundred oceans rolling in my ears” – from a surfeit of the fruit of Temple’s garden, we ought not to take it as a metaphor. The Tale of a Tub was an attempt to exorcise that vision; but it stole up behind him in still more surreal shape.
‘And now I must ask you to take with me in imagination a journey that many of you will already have taken in fact: to St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, and to that spot where adjoining tablets in the floor mark the resting-place of Swift and of that other member of Temple’s household whom he knew as Stella. From here you can see the black marble slab upon which is carved what a character in Yeats describes as “the greatest epitaph in history”...
‘It is Middleton Murry who has noticed its oddity. “It is silent”, he writes, “on any Christian hope. It might be the epitaph of one of his Roman heroes – a Brutus or a Cato: except perhaps for the fierce indignation that tears at his heart no more. Death is not the opening of a gate, but the closing of a wound”’.

‘Pope and Anti-Pope: Addison’, Eigo-Eibei-Bungaku, XXXVI (1996), 229-39: ‘Pope’s first major poem, the Essay on Criticism, contained an attack on John Dennis, the critic. Dogmatism was translated into physical description: a staring eye, a face that flushed angrily at contradiction, and a habit of intemperate speech. Dennis responded in kind: wondering aloud, and with much wealth of detail, whether Pope, who suffered from arrested growth and severe curvature of the spine, was “a proper Author to make personal Reflections on others”.
‘No respectable motive for Pope’s attack has ever been established. Dennis put it down to “Envy and Malice”: to an attempt, in a poem of which the subject was criticism, to supplant him in that discipline; and his modern editor is disposed to agree. “As the most conspicuous critic then living in England”, writes Hooker, “Dennis was the obvious rival and the obvious target”.
‘Some time afterwards, the Essay on Criticism received another review. Addison wrote in a spirit very different from that of Dennis: where the earlier critic had found nothing but “Depravity of Genius and Tast”, he discovered “Elegance and Perspicuity”. But on one matter he agreed perfectly with Dennis: so fine a poet as Pope, he declared, had no need for “Envy and Detraction”; and he supported this with a quotation from Denham: “Nor needs thy juster Title the foul Guilt / Of Eastern Kings, who to secure their Reign / Must have their Brothers, Sons and Kindred slain”...
‘When the Catholic James II was expelled from the throne of England, in the year of Pope’s birth, “every blossom of popish hope”, says Johnson, “was blasted... A papist now could no longer be Laureat”. Dryden, who had converted to Catholicism, lost this position at the revolution. Pope, too, was Catholic; and in the Essay on Criticism, as Dennis noticed, identified himself with Dryden... And, as Addison’s verses on William and his ministers had led him to public office, Pope’s first attack, appropriately, concentrated on these.
‘But offence, apparently, did not end with power: Addison had succeeded, not only to the rewards of poetry, but to its prestige. Dryden, with whom Pope so deeply identified, had paid Addison a splendid compliment. Always capable of friendship across the lines of party, the young scholar had helped the Catholic poet with his translation of Vergil; and Dryden, when he came to publish, stated that the excellence of Addison’s own version had been “troublesome” to him. “After his Bees”, he wrote, “my latter swarm is scarcely worth the hiving”.
‘This was the poem that Pope singled out for his second attack...
‘To Dennis’ charge that he had been attacked “in my Person, instead of my Writings”, Pope opposed a bland denial. Then, in an anonymous pamphlet, he described the critic as “A baneful Hunch-back’d Toad, with look Maligne”.
Dennis had written of Pope as a “hunch-back’d Toad”; Pope, at whatever cost in truth or plausibility, has flung the description back...
‘Addison had described him as bearing no brother near the throne; it required no gift of prophecy, for anyone familiar with Pope’s mental processes, to discern the form in which Addison would finally appear’.

‘The Golden Bough and Sharawadgi: Byzantium in Gibbon and Yeats’: paper presented to IASIL world conference, New York, 1996; published (retitled) 1999.

‘The Japanese Dawn of Romanticism': paper presented at Chuo University, 1996; published (retitled) 1997.

‘Pope and Anti-Pope: Atticus’, Eigo-Eibei-Bungaku, XXXVII (1997), 225-34. ‘Among the Pope manuscripts in the British Library, scribbled on the backs or the covers of letters, still heavy with the original seals or glittering with the mica of the sand used to dry the ink, is a page of jottings in which the workings of Pope’s mind can be followed as he attempts to fashion the fictional Addison whom he was to label “Atticus”. Of these the opening couplet runs: “But our Great Turks in Wit must reign alone / & ill can bear a Brother on ye throne”.
‘This was to remain the basic thrust of the assault: to invert the image that Addison had applied, with such devastating accuracy, to himself. The truth of this becomes apparent in another couplet: “wits starve as useless to a Common weal / while Fools have places merely for their Zeal” – a comforting explanation for Addison’s political success; while the self-pity that informs the reflection whines still more plaintively in a cancelled version of the first line: “Poor wits deserve more of ye Common weal”.
‘Here is the original grievance – envy of Addison – out in the open. How to make it seem the opposite was the problem. It did not long remain so’.

‘Towards the Japanese Sunrise: A Celtic Pilgrimage’, Éire, XVII (1997). ‘The story begins in Kyoto, at the garden of Entsūji. It was my first year in this country, and the Japanese person who brought me there explained that the cryptomeria which frame the view of Mt. Hiei had been set there deliberately, in a concept known as borrowed landscape, or shakkei.
‘The following year, I revisited Ireland, still with the same person, and brought her to a garden named Oak Park just outside my hometown of Carlow. It is in the style of the English eighteenth century, woods surrounding an islanded lake. It was winter, at sunset, a pale light glowing on the water; and against the sky, chill and clear, I could see the silhouette, far away, of Mount Leinster. The view of Mt. Hiei came back to me; and at that moment I recalled that the lake was artificial, the scene before me no less a deliberate creation than the Japanese. Here, too, it seemed, was shakkei.
‘We were on a Christmas vacation from the U.S., where we were studying at Cornell University, and when we went back there I spoke to my professor of my experience, remarking what a coincidence it was. He told me it was not coincidence, and sent me to a kind of cage in the Olin Library, where rare books were kept locked. There I found that the English landscape garden had begun with an idea which – so the book said – had come from either China or Japan; while another book argued that this garden was the earliest manifestation of romanticism.
‘And there I discovered that the person who introduced the idea had lived only a few miles from Oak Park. His name was William Temple, he was member of parliament for the area three hundred years ago, and the foundations of his house can still be seen overlooking the river-valley in which the town of Carlow stands. Here was a story, it seemed, that I had no option but to pursue...
‘I am grateful to...Professor Daidō Fumiko for Entsūji and much else... The professor was Robert J. Smith, the rare book Osvald Sirén’s China and the Gardens of Europe of the Eighteenth Century, New York 1950, the other Arthur Lovejoy’s Great Chain of Being, Cambridge, Mass. 1974’.

‘Lafcadio Hearn: a Spiritual Odyssey’, in Irish Writing on Lafcadio Hearn & Japan, ed. Sean G. Ronan (Folkestone: Global Oriental, 1997). Hearn as scottus peregrinus. ‘Intriguing’ (David Burleigh).

‘Japan as Celtic Otherworld: Lafcadio Hearn and the Long Way Home’: paper presented to Asia-Pacific Symposium on Irish Literature, Sydney, 1998; published 2003.

‘Murder in the Garden: Addison, Atticus and the End of Romantic Japan’, Eigo-Eibei-Bungaku, XXXVIII (1998), 253-63: ‘“The new fashion’, notes Miles Hadfield, “was essentially Whig”. “Informal gardens”, agrees Michael Reed, “were associated with liberty in general, and with the Whig version of it in particular”. Christopher Hussey, accordingly, draws attention to the strange phenomenon of “Tory Pope enunciating the identity, which Whig amateurs of gardening constantly stressed, of Nature with Liberty”. This he discovers in the “precocious Essay on Criticism”, from which he quotes: “Nature, like Liberty, is but restrain’d / By the same Laws that first herself ordain’d”.
‘If Pope indeed expressed this view in the Essay on Criticism, as originally printed, he was more than precocious; he was incomprehensible. For this was a poem, as Dennis had noted, of which the political vision was Jacobite. And in fact it was “Monarchy”, and not “Liberty”, which at this time was declared to be absolute; the about-face came in a revision made long afterwards. The Jacobite euphoria had faded as the Tory ministers quarelled, and vanished when, at the Hanoverian succession, they fled into exile or were incarcerated in the Tower: as was the suspected Jacobite to whom Windsor-Forest had been inscribed. Self-interest now suggested that Pope dissociate himself from the cause he had so lately glorified; and he moved from Windsor Forest to the riverside near Twickenham, there placing himself, as Erskine-Hill observes, “under the protection of the Whig Lord Burlington”: a protection under which he was to shelter for the rest of his life...to such effect that Courthope was able to state, without conscious irony, that “Pope was the poet of the Revolution of 1688”.
‘This newfound ideal was appealed to on personal, no less than political, grounds. “If our Principles be well consider’d”, he exclaims in the bogus correspondence, “I must appear a brave Whig, and Mr. Tickel a rank Tory; I translated Homer for the publick in general, he to gratify the inordinate desires of One man only. We have, it seems, a great Turk in poetry, who can never bear a Brother on the throne; and has his Mutes too, a sett of Nodders, Winkers, and Whisperers, whose business it is to strangle all other offsprings of wit in their birth. The new Translator of Homer is the humblest slave he has, that is to say, his first Minister; let him receive the honours he gives him, but receive them with fear and trembling: let him be proud of the approbation of his absolute Lord; I appeal to the People”.
‘Pope here completes his reversal of characters. Not content with imputing his own tyranny of temperament to Addison, he now attributes Addison’s psychological liberation to himself. This illusory freedom was put forward with the most relentless deliberation, the most rigid obsession, all concealed under an apparent spontaneity. In the preface to his fabricated letters, he rested their authenticity on the claim that an “Author’s Hand, like a Painter’s”, was “more distinguishable in a slight sketch than in a finish’d picture”.
‘So too, at Twickenham, he splashed the brushwork of sharawadgi over the ground-plan of the hortus conclusus. It was a space, said Horace Walpole, “enclosed with three lanes and seeing nothing”; and on the fourth side, leading under the house to the river, was the tunnel, or grotto, that could be shut off at will.
‘And in Pope’s apologia, in which substance and setting coincide, this is what occurs. The poem opens with the poet’s cry for closure: “Shut, shut the door, good John!”
‘It is to be shut against the irruption of other poets who, professedly contemptible, yet loom with some mysterious sense of threat: “What Walls can guard me, or what Shades can hide? / They pierce my Thickets, thro’ my Grot they glide.”
‘The threat was of invasion of the circuit within which the poet was secure; and, at the “turning point of the poem...precisely at its centre” – corresponding to the need that he fulfilled – was the mythic figure of Atticus’.

‘Sharawadgi: The Japanese Source of Romanticism’, Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, Fourth Series, XIII (1998). ‘At the foot of the hills that crowd into Nagasaki harbour, a dusty tramline curves parallel to a muddy canal. Between them runs a laneway in a similar curve. These follow the outline and the single street of Deshima: the artificial island, shaped like the paper of a fan, to which the Dutch were confined over two centuries. Here, for the duration, was the only gateway between Japan and Europe; and the tall brush of an araucaria, brought there from Indonesia, still stands in one of its gardens – as if marking, like an exclamation-point, the spot where the romantic movement began...
‘The question people in Europe tend to ask is, “How did the irregular garden begin?”. But the question for people here is, “How did the regular garden begin?”. It seems incomprehensible, as Temple reported, that anyone should wish to create a garden of straight lines; and to us, coming after romanticism, it may seem incomprehensible also. Certainly it did not become clear to me until, in pursuit of this subject, I visited Spain.
‘I was there in the summer, when there is an intense, withering heat over the dry landscape, all purples and browns. And then, one afternoon, as I walked through the Moorish gardens of the Alhambra, I felt a luxurious coldness emanate from an avenue of fountains. These flow from the Sierra Nevada, the snowy hills above the city, and even in the height of summer are always cool. And so, for the first time, I understood the meaning, to the desert-dweller, of water.
‘And the European garden goes back to the desert, to the countryside around Babylon. In a land of little rainfall, water came from the Tigris and the Euphrates: rivers whose annual flooding, unlike that of the Nile, was violent and unpredictable, and so had to be contained and carried out over the land by canals. These ran through irregular ground; with, always, a slight downward flow: a process which required complex mathematical calculation. The people of this region were, it seems, the first great mathematicians; sixty, for them, was a sacred number – presumably as combining the bases of ten and twelve – and we still follow their system in the division of the circle and the dial of the hours. Every time we look at our watches, we live again in Babylon. And the greatest of Babylonian stories tells how Ishtar, goddess of the land, went down into the underworld and died; and was revived by being sprinkled with water – sixty times. For the peoples of Babylon, then, the regulation of water meant the difference between death and life.
‘The gardens of the Babylonians...were built over a crisscross of waterways: as were those of their successors the Persians. Paradise – the Persian word for enclosure – was a pattern of trees around a cross canal. None of these ancient gardens, however, has survived; their oldest descendants are those of Spain. And in the Court of the Lions at the Alhambra, this is the pattern you find. Carried to the west by Islam, it was carried by the same force to the east, where the most elaborate of all geometrical gardens is to be seen before the Taj Mahal. Here again is the cross canal, its square interstices divided into other squares, which in turn are subdivided into further squares, and these into others again. It need surprise us no longer to find regularity in the garden. Nor is it a surprise, when we return to Versailles, to find this, too, built around the Babylonian pattern of the cross canal’.

‘Sharawadgi Resolved’, Garden History, XXVI (1998). ‘Convincing’ (Jan Woudstra & Timothy Mowl).

Sharawadgi: The Romantic Return to Nature (Bethesda, MD: International Scholars, (1999). ‘Addison has no doubt etched Pope’s likeness in acid; but he had for several years now been the object of a petty, persistent and almost insane persecution; and “it is intolerable”, said Wilde, “to be dogged by a maniac”...
When Steele came to the end of the original Spectator, he attributed to Addison all those papers “marked with a C, an L, an I, or an O, that is to say, all the Papers which I have distinguished by any Letter in the name of the Muse C L I O”.
‘This would seem to be perfectly straightforward; yet its meaning was missed from the start. Steele was writing, suggested an eighteenth-century editor, currente calamo, and without “intention or authority to explain the meaning of Addison’s signatures”. If this was so, he hit upon an extraordinary coincidence. For the letters appear in the order in which he cited them, and Clio is the muse of history, and by extension of all writing in prose...
‘Yet it is Addison himself who has confounded the code of his achievement. When only the C and the L of the muse’s name had appeared, he took note of the curiosity they had aroused, and studiously misdirected inquirers. Running these together with the X of cousin Budgell, which he professed to take as the number ten, he implied that they, too, were to be considered under their numerical aspect.
‘For this he had excellent reasons. He was aware of the animosity with which he was regarded by one closed and cunning mind; and he was aware too, as it seems probable, that whatever was openly asserted could as openly be distorted or denied. It was for this reason, one presumes – or perhaps from some sense of premonition – that he referred his readers, for a “full Explication” of these “obscure Marks”, to “Time, which discovers all things”. They were, he suggested, “little Amulets or Charms”, designed to preserve his creation from the “Fascination and Malice of Evil Eyes”.
‘So they have. For a quarter of a millenium, while in the world above his monument was defaced, they have preserved their secret unbroken: like the seal on a pharaonic tomb...
‘Romanticism, in its immediate origins, is the aesthetic manifestation of the English revolution. It was Temple who, through his diplomacy in Holland, made that revolution possible; and who, through his discovery there of the naturalist gardens of Japan, brought these as well within the English ambit. These two achievements were fused by Addison in the course of an extraordinary inward journey. The revolution had brought him liberation; and in the thought of a lifetime this came to pervade every aspect of psychic life, in a return to nature of which the landscape garden was both embodiment and symbol.
‘The same revolution had dispossessed Pope, and his resentment was concentrated on its most effective celebrant. His slander of Addison, and appropriation of his achievement, detached this from its roots in personality, and reduced its history to fragments. But Addison had already unleashed the energy of the romantic movement, which is emotional liberation, with its drive to psychic wholeness. So it was that the chief architect of romanticism remained buried in his handiwork: as the tree which upheld the palace of Byblos became, in the interval of his death and resurrection, the living coffin of Osiris’.

‘The Golden Flower of Byzantium’, Éire, XIX (1999). Light & enlightenment in Plotinus & Zen.

‘Sharawadgi Transformed: Romanticism in Gibbon and Yeats’, Eigo-Eibei-Bungaku, XL (2000). Golden tree as anti-natural in Gibbon and supra-natural in Yeats.

‘The Holy Tree: Alchemy and Arbor Philosophica in the Work of W.B. Yeats’, The Harp, XV (2000). Arboreal archetypes of transformation.

‘Kyoto’s Temples to Tara’s Halls’, Éire, XX (2000). Sharawadgi & the founding family of Irish Romanticism: Henry to Charlotte Brooke.

‘A Borrowed Vista’, Newsletter No. 27, Kyoto International Cultural Association (2001). How the ‘borrowed vista’ (shakkei) of a Kyoto garden initiated the search for sharawadgi.

‘A Japanese Source of Romanticism’, The Wordsworth Circle, XXXII (2001). ‘Interesting...unexpected’ (Marilyn Gaull).

‘Night of the Living Sculptures: Asia and Europe in Yeats’, Journal of Irish Studies, XVI (2001). Development of views put to a conference of IASIL-Japan (Shimonoseki, 1^st-2^nd October 1999); later incorporated into Disorientalism. ‘That strange poem “The Statues” seems in its main outlines perfectly straightforward. It appears indisputable that in the phrase “that ancient sect” Yeats refers to the followers of Pythagoras, with whose name it opens. As Pythagoras was thought to have shared belief with the Druids...; and as, furthermore, that belief was reincarnation, the poem can be seen as condemning materialism, “this filthy modern tide”. “We Irish”, then, Berkeley’s dismissal of materialist philosophy, takes on a peculiar richness of resonance... The question...condensed into “proper dark”, and proposed more discursively in the poem as a whole, is this: what is the specific gravity of the soul of Ireland? What is its metaphysical mathematics? What the proportion expressed by Pearse in the Post Office? What the equation inscribed by the Easter rising? Surely, as this squandering of bodily life implies, no different from what it was for the Druids or Pythagoras’. ‘A beautiful piece of work’ (Kathleen Raine, letter to author, 29^th January 2002, alluding to W. B. Yeats and the Learning of the Imagination; where she had written: ‘Imagination, according to’...‘the age-old and universal doctrine of the sophia perennis’...‘is the creative principle itself... Poetry and the other arts are basic modalities of human thought, concerned not with knowledge “about” but with knowledge “of”... True imaginative learning is a search for truth and reality, not for information as such or in the service of some theory’. And at the opposite pole to that scholarship which masks smallness of mind and meanness of spirit).

The Secret Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Tokyo: Castle Quarter Press, 2002).

‘Ruskin’s Gothic’, Times Literary Supplement, 7^th March 2003. Ruskin as heir to sharawadgi.

‘Japan as Celtic Otherworld: Lafcadio Hearn and the Long Way Home’, in Irelands in the Asia-Pacific, ed. Peter Kuch & Julie-Ann Robson (Gerrards Cross: Smythe, 2003). ‘Ciaran Murray...talking mythopoeic tongues’ (Bruce Stewart).

‘No Such Country: Oscar Wilde and Shades of Japan’, Éire, XXIII (2003). Gautier in Whistler’s Symphonies in White & Wilde’s Salomé.

‘Art for Art’s Sake: France and Germany’, Eigo-Eibei-Bungaku, XLIV (2004). Romanticism to Aestheticism: Wilde between Ruskin & Pater; flashback to de Staël, Goethe & Schiller.

‘The Word that Changed the World: Japan and the Origins of Romanticism’, Essays in English Romanticism, XXVIII (2004).

‘In the Light of Japan: The Transformation of European Aesthetics from Romanticism to Modernism’, Journal of the Institute of Cultural Science, Chuo University, LI (2004).

‘“Heaven Blazing into the Head”: The Background to Satori in Yeats’, Éire, XXIV (2004). ‘As space to substance, so silence to speech’.

‘Japan: Three Waves of Influence, 1689-1939’, Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, Fourth Series, XVIII (2004). Japan in Romanticism, Aestheticism & Modernism: garden, print & theatre; Hemingway in terms of Japanese space.

‘Art for Art’s Sake: Germany and France’, Eigo-Eibei-Bungaku, XLV (2005). Romanticism to Aestheticism: Kant to de Staël, Cousin & Gautier.

‘Enigma of the Russian Garden’, Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, Fourth Series, XIX (2005). Sharawadgi in Romantic Russia.

‘Getting There from Here’, Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, Fourth Series, XIX (2005). Helen Waddell in Japan. ‘Lovely… captures Helen’ (Mollie Martin).

‘Hibernian, Hellene, Hindu: métaphysique nocturne’, Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, Fourth Series, XIX (2005), Supplement: Religion East and West. Eriugenian metaphysics in the light of India.

‘Art for Art’s Sake: England and France’, Eigo-Eibei-Bungaku, XLVI (2006). Romanticism to Aestheticism: Gautier, dandyism & decadence.

The Three and the Four: Ireland & Identity (Tokyo: Castle Quarter Press, 2006). ‘The place I am out of is Carlow, that county in the province of Leinster which is shaped like a seahorse... The present essay, however, aims to explore, not place as such, but place as it impinges on the psyche. Let me begin, then, with the symbolic overtones the name evokes. ‘The word loch is cognate with Latin lacus, which, like Greek lakkos, signifies “tank” or “hollow”: apparently the fundamental meaning, as in lacūna, gap or space. Which brings us to a second cluster of words, represented by Sanskrit loka. This, we are told, “originally referred to an open place (as in a deep jungle) in which one could see the light of day... To reside in a loka was...to live where one could see things the way they truly are...to establish a loka was to form a systematic and meaningful ‘world’...to locate oneself...to find a locus of being within the chaos of existence”.
‘Ceathar, “four”, is allied to Sanskrit catur and Latin quattuor, which gives English quarter, quartet, quarry, where stones are cut into squares, and square itself, with its variant squadron, square of soldiers: all further defining the sense of space. But the word in this context means something more. The name of Carlow, Ceithiorlach, it has been noted, is “compounded exactly” as is Ceithir-Leabhar, the Quadruple Book or Four Gospels: that is to say, a group of four which forms a unit, a quaternity; and the quaternity, Jung tells us, is the archetype of completion: four directions in the circuit of the horizon, four seasons in the cycle of the year, four provinces composing Ireland, the foursquare orientation of the Chinese city; and, in the Jungian system itself, four functions of the psyche. Characteristically, one of these is different from the other three: among the four evangelists, three are animal and one human, as also with the sons of Horus; or the Virgin Mary and the Trinity, where one is female and the others male; or, with Jung, the function of the psyche that remains more or less unconscious.’

デインシャナハスとアイデンティティ: カーローの場合 (‘Dinnsheanchas and Identity: The Case of Carlow’), in ケルト口承文化の水脈 (Celtic Whispers: Currents of Culture), Tokyo: Chuo University Press, 2006. Japanese version of The Three and the Four.

‘Cricket without a Bat’, Japan-Ireland Society News (日本アイルランド協会会報) No. 62 (July 2006). A well-hidden Ireland.

‘Of Hadrian and Hong Kong’, Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, Fourth Series, XX (2006). Asia and the Pervigilium Veneris.

‘Vampire as Victim’, Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, Fourth Series, XX (2006). Pre-Raphaelitism, Ceylon & Japan.

‘A Rocky Road’, Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, Fourth Series, XX (2006). Reginald Farrer, the gardens of England & Japan.

‘The Protean Fox in Hearn and Yeats’, Poetica, LXV (2006). Archetypes of ambivalence and enablement.

‘Dance of the Spiral’, Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, Fourth Series, XX (2006), Supplement: Life and Learning. Celtic analogues in India.

‘Art for Art’s Sake: Japan and France’, Eigo-Eibei-Bungaku, XLVII (2007). Romanticism to Aestheticism: Gautier, Whistler & the Japanese print.

‘The Reception of W. B. Yeats in Europe’, Journal of Irish Studies, XXII (2007). French, German & Italian versions of Yeats.

‘Alphabetic Discrimination: Jeanie to her Samurai’, Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, Fourth Series, XXI (2007). A leader of Meiji Japan & his Scots lover, with her discrimination in favour of the letter X recalling Catullus. Soles occidere et redire possunt: /nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux, / nox est perpetua una dormienda; ‘Sky / finds dawn after every sundown; you and I, / our light’s brief. Quenched, we’ll sleep / one perpetual night’

‘Art for Art’s Sake: Japan and England’, Eigo-Eibei-Bungaku, XLVIII (2008). Romanticism to Aestheticism: Whistler, Wilde & Yeats.

‘The Cruel Dawn and Other Faces of Kālī’, Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, Fourth Series, XXII (2008), 27-41. Offbeat activities of the British in India, from intermarriage to Tantra.

‘Replacing a Signpost’, Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, Fourth Series, XXII (2008), 203-4. Influences of Indian philosophy on T. S. Eliot.

‘Georgie under the Branstock: The Love Life of William Morris’, Eigo-Eibei- Bungaku, XLIX (2009), 11-22. Questioning of the conventional image of Morris as plaster saint.

‘Some Versions of Nothing’, Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies, XIV (2009), 9-20. Zero and the void in India, China & Japan; in Whistler, Pound, Eliot & Hemingway.

Disorientalism: Asian Subversions, Irish Visions (Tokyo: Asiatic Society of Japan, 2009).

‘Damhsa na Bíse’, Lá Nua (‘New Day’), Forlíonadh Ealaíona (‘Arts Supplement’), February 9^th and 16^th, 2009. Translation into Irish of ‘Dance of the Spiral’ (above) by poet, historian and publisher (Coiscéim) Pádraig Ó Snodaigh.

‘After Catullus LVIII’, CA News (Bulletin of the Classical Association) XL (June 2009). ‘Lesbia, the Lesbia, my Lesbia, whom I loved beyond life, now drains / bubblehead bodybuilders in back lanes’.

‘Damhsa na Bíse’, Nuacht 24, 15^th April 2010. Revised translation of ‘Dance of the Spiral’ (above) by Pádraig Ó Snodaigh.

‘Spaces of the Southern Song’, International Conference on Modernism and the Orient, Hangzhou, 4^th—7^th June 2010. Intermediacy of Chinese landscape painting in transmission of Indian philosophy to Modernist literature.

Muireann Ní Bhrolcháin, Early Irish Literature and the contemporary overtones of her subject, Journal of Irish Studies, XXV (2010). ‘Myth is not about what happened; it is about what happens’.

‘The Man Behan Knew’, Japan-Ireland Society News No. 79. Street theatre.

‘The Raj as Romantic Vision’, Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, Fifth Series, II (2010), 181-8. Lutyens’ New Delhi in the English landscape tradition.

‘No Fire in Hell’, Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, Fifth Series, II (2010), 227-32. The varieties of Indian religious experience.

‘Light in the Castle of the Grail’, Eigo-Eibei-Bungaku LI (2011), 1-9. Celtic antecedents and archetypal character of Arthurian romance.

‘The Buddhist Image and the Mafia’, AV (Chuo University) 48, 9-11. Storytelling in fiction and film.

‘The Last Etruscan’, Japan-Ireland Society News No. 82. A poor scholar of the sixties.

‘Heart Sutra on Hanging Rock’, Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, Fifth Series, III (2011), 184-91. The ‘Positive Nothingness’ of India on Australian sacred rock and in Japanese stone garden.

‘Lotus and Papyrus’, Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, Fifth Series, III (2011), 237-46. Egyptian religion (Isis & Osiris) in India (Pattinī) and Europe (Die Zauberflöte).

‘The Labyrinth as God’s Script’, Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, Fifth Series, III (2011), 276-89. Borges, Japan and India.

‘Dream of the Dim Professor’, Eigo-Eibei-Bungaku LII (2012), 1-9. Archetypal character and continuing relevance of Arthurian romance.

‘Submarine Serenade’, Japan-Ireland Society News No. 84. Disappearance of a Dublin spy.

‘The Irish Odyssey: Intersections and Implications’, IASIL-Japan Conference, Meiji University, Tokyo, 7^th October 2012. Homer, the Gaelic Odyssey (De Brún) & Ulysses: Leopold Bloom & Odysseus polymēchanos; Nausicaa & the Phoenician date-palm; Molly Bloom & Frazer’s Aphrodite.

‘A Long Way to Bahrampur’, Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, Fifth Series, IV (2012), 235-48. Indian ruler from Ireland.

‘A Long Way to Brighton’, Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, Fifth Series, IV (2012), 249-59. Irish writer from India.

‘Caesar’s Day of Crisis’, Eigo-Eibei-Bungaku LIII (2013), 1-8. Celtic myth in the transformations of classical coinage and Christian legend.

‘Celtic Cross’, Japan-Ireland Society News No. 87 (2013). The four quarters and the centre.

‘Choreography of the Void: Hinduism in Forster and Farrell’, Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, Fifth Series, V (2013), 81-97. E. M. Forster and J. G. Farrell on Indian religion.

‘Date for a Goddess’, Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, Fifth Series, V (2013), 196-208. Troy, Phaeacia, Byblos: the Gaelic Odyssey as collaborative creation to Molly Bloom as Frazerian goddess.

‘Keeper of Souls’, Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, Fifth Series, V (2013), 323-44. Yeats, de Valois, Nureyev.

Voyagings: Ireland, India, Japan (Tokyo: Castle Quarter Press, 2014).

‘Osiris in Ireland’, Eigo-Eibei-Bungaku LIV (2014), 1-8. Asymmetry, ambiguity and the otherworld in Celtic art and literature.

‘Sharawadgi Agonistes’, Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, Fifth Series, VI (2014), 289-99. What matters about sharawadgi is what happened to it in England.

‘But O O O O That Medieval Rag’, Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, Fifth Series, VI (2014), 301-7. Wandering scholars, medieval and modern.

‘Sharawadgi Revisited’, Shakkei: The Journal of the Japanese Garden Society, XXI: 2 (Autumn 2014), pp. 2-4. Arguments for sharawadgi as Japanese rather than Chinese.

Ports of Call: Canberra to Kurukshetra (Tokyo: Castle Quarter Press, 2015).

‘Secret Agent’, Eigo-Eibei-Bungaku LV (2015), 45-55. Otherworld and unreality in Irish literature and life.

‘Sound over Silence’, Japan-Ireland Society News No. 90 (2015). Michael Kelly and Mozart: Zen and the Upanishads.

‘Sweetness from the Strong’, Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, Fifth Series, VII (2015), pp. 182-5; Ports of Call: Canberra to Kurukshetra.

‘Garema Dream’. Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, Fifth Series, VII (2015), pp. 185-93; Ports of Call: Canberra to Kurukshetra.

‘The Vision and the Dance’. Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, Fifth Series, VII (2015), pp. 193-202; Ports of Call: Canberra to Kurukshetra.

‘Square of Stillness’. Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, Fifth Series, VII (2015), pp. 228-31; Ports of Call: Canberra to Kurukshetra.

Ports of Call: Dinn Ree to New Delhi (Tokyo: Castle Quarter Press, 2016).

‘Plunge to Oblivion’, Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, Fifth Series, VIII (2016), pp. 275-85; Ports of Call: Dinn Ree to New Delhi.

‘Mandala Mountain’, Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, Fifth Series, VIII (2016), pp. 285-300; Ports of Call: Dinn Ree to New Delhi.

Ports of Call: Braganza to Hyderabad (Tokyo: Castle Quarter Press, 2017).

‘All in a Whirl’, Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, Fifth Series, IX (2017), pp. 191-3; Ports of Call: Braganza to Hyderabad.

‘Expert Tictacs’, Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, Fifth Series, IX (2017), pp. 194-205; Ports of Call: Braganza to Hyderabad.

‘Wholes within Wheels’, Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, Fifth Series, IX (2017), pp. 253-70; Ports of Call: Braganza to Hyderabad.

Ports of Call: Dublin Street to the Tree of Shiva (Tokyo: Castle Quarter Press, 2018).

‘Lights Unbushelled’, Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, Fifth Series, X (2018), pp. 167-9. Note on the history of the journal.

‘Trees of Tragedy and Transformation’, Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, Fifth Series, X (2018), pp. 187-211; Ports of Call: Dublin Street to the Tree of Shiva.

‘Suspended over a Pause’, Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, Fifth Series, X (2018), pp. 232-9; Ports of Call: Dublin Street to the Tree of Shiva (‘Books about Books’).

‘In Memoriam Dorenae’, Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, Fifth Series, X (2018), pp. 246-7. Appreciation of Doreen Simmons.

‘Otherworld Pilgrim’, in Junko Okura, Bon Koizumi et al., Sayonara: Japanese Folklore collected by Patrick Lafcadio Hearn, with Irish translation by Pádraig Mac Cearáin (Dublin: Coiscéim, 2018).

Ports of Call: Castle Hill to the Circuit of Krishna (Tokyo: Castle Quarter Press, 2019).

‘haiku: vision, volume, void’, Shakkei: Journal of the Japanese Garden Society, XXVII, ii (Autumn 2020), 17.

Ports of Call: Red Fort to Crystal Palace (Tokyo: Castle Quarter Press, 2020).

‘haiku: vista, vortex’, Shakkei: Journal of the Japanese Garden Society, XXVII, iv (Spring 2021), 21.

‘Realms of Gold’: Foreword to George Sioris, Stray Leaves of Historical Writing: East and West, Chiang Mai, 2021.

‘haiku: voyage’, Shakkei: Journal of the Japanese Garden Society, XXVIII, ii (Autumn 2021), 44.

Ports of Call: Xanadu to Zuisenji (Tokyo: Castle Quarter Press, 2021).

‘The Secret Life of Sharawadgi’, Shakkei, XXIX, i (Summer 2022), 24-30.

Ports of Call: Latin Quarter to Mount Koya (Tokyo: Castle Quarter Press, 2022).

‘Sharawadgi and its Dwellings of Dream’, Shakkei, XXIX, iii (Winter 2022-3), 36-9.

‘Sharawadgi: Borrowing the Illimitable’, Shakkei, XXIX, iv (Spring 2023), 32-7.

Ports of Call: Córdoba to Valparaíso (Tokyo: Castle Quarter Press, 2023).

‘Sharawadgi as the Sublime’, Shakkei, XXX, iii (Winter 2023-4), 34-9.

‘haibun: current’, Shakkei, XXX, iv (Spring 2024), 22-3.

‘haibun: cargo’, Shakkei, XXXI, i (Summer 2024), 34-5.

‘haibun: continent’, Shakkei, XXXI, ii (Autumn 2024), 22-3.

Ports of Call: Urglin Glebe to Aladdin’s Vault (Tokyo: Castle Quarter Press, 2024).