Eugenius Roche

[1] Roche was born on 23 February 1786 in Paris, where his father who educated him was professor of modern languages in the École Militaire.

[3] In 1807 Roche started a periodical Monthly Literary Recreations, for Ben Crosby, then Lord Byron's publisher.

[6] In 1808 Roche began The Dramatic Appellant, a quarterly journal whose object was to print rejected plays of the period; it was not a conspicuous success.

[10] While editing it, however, Roche was sentenced to a year's imprisonment in the Marshalsea Prison, in 1811, for an attack on the government over the case of Sir Francis Burdett.

[12] The language used included the phrase "wanton desire of shedding blood", of soldiers dispersing crowds when Burdett was being taken to the Tower of London, enough to convict the proprietors of The Day even at a time when the judicial attitude to libels was softening.

His obituary in Fraser's Magazine described the circumstances: he had paid heavily for a small share in The Courier, and had remarried about 18 months before.

[3] A sum was subscribed for Roche's widow (second wife) and family, and his poems were collected and published by subscription, with a memoir and portrait, as London in a Thousand Years (1830).

[3][17] The title poem, a long work touched by apocalyptic thought, has been described as "not so much a Last Man narrative as a promenade among ruins".