Life
1818-1895; b. Cork; ed. TCD, and close friend of Thomas Davis; contrib.
The Nation; imprisoned for four months in 1848; later director
of Cork Gas Works, and business concerns including railway; President
of Cork Literary and Scientific Society, who aroused antagonism of Douglas
Hyde at an Irish-language meeting in 1893. PI JMC DBIV DIH RAF OCIL.
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Notes
John John Cooke, The Dublin Book of Irish Verse (Dublin: Hodges
Figgis 1909), gives bio-dates 1818-1896; selects "Kate of Araglen";
"Lament of the Irish Maiden" [‘"I am alone, for he
is gone, / My hawk has flown, ochone machree ... my Donnell Dhu!’].
D. J. O’Donoghue, Poets of Ireland (Dublin: Hodges Figgis 1912), ‘One of the poets of Young Ireland days.’ SEE Justin McCarthy, ed., Irish Literature (1904)., calls him a successful merchant in Cork for whom a few poems have won wide popularity; the best known, cited here, appeared in The Nation in 1844 and 1845 over the signature Donall-na-Glanna; his ‘Recollections’ appeared in The Irish Monthly. gives ‘Kate of Arraglen’ and ‘The lament of the Irish Maiden’. SEE also O’Lochlainn, Anglo-Irish Song-Writers, ‘The Lament of the Irish Maiden’; ‘There’s a bower of Roses by Bendemeer’s stream’ ... now forgotten. DIH cites ‘Carrig Dhoun’.
W. P. Ryan, The Irish Literary Revival (London: 1894), notes that Denny Lane, MA, is one of the few survivors of the original Nation writers, and one who has identified himself with every movement calculated to benefit his native city [Cork], particularly in a literary or social direction [161]. Note small engraving of Lane in leftwards profile, op. cit., facing p.162.
McKenna, Irish Literature (1978), Denny Lane, ‘Then and Now, A Literary Retrospect,’Irish Monthly, 13 (1885), in which Lane reminisces on ‘what we read, what we wrote, and what we thought of, in Cork 50 yrs ago’, touching on J. J. Callanan, J. Sheridan Knowles, Samuel Lover, Daniel Owen Madden, William Maginn, and Francis Sylvester Mahoney. Also, ‘The Irish Accent in English Literature’, Irish Monthly, 21 (1893), address to National Lit. Soc. urging continuation of work of Thomas Davis ‘to encourage good literature and above all things to make it Irish.’
Dominic Daly, The Young Douglas Hyde (1974), Denny Lane is in the chair at the meeting to promote the national Literary Society to which Count Plunkett, Yeats and Hyde, ‘in top form’ by his own account, journeyed to speak (23 Jan 1893). [160] Note, prominent Young Irelander, spent four months in prison; released without trial; president of Cork Literary and Scientific Soc., chairman of two local railway companies, and mng. direcor of Cork Gas Co.; a couple of poems in The Nation [n., 220]
At a large meeting in Cork early in 1893, Lane of Young Ireland renown,
said that if we had to have about us the chain of a foreign language he
was happy it would be English, ‘the jewelled key that opened to us
the storeroom containing the wealth of centuries from the time of Chaucer
and Shakespeare down to the present day.’ Hyde reacted as he had
done in Dublin. He said that the GAA had done more for Ireland in the
five years since it was established than speakers like Lane had done in
sixty. See Léon Ó Bróin, Protestant Nationalists
in Revolutionary Ireland (1985), p.10.
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)