American journalist and poet, born in Mountmellick, Ireland, on the 31st of May 1847. While he was an infant his parents moved to Prince Edward Island, and he was educated in St. Dunstan’s College in that province. In 1866 he went to Boston, where he was engaged in commercial business for seventeen years. In 1883 he joined the staff of the Boston Pilot, of which John Boyle O’Reilly was the editor-in-chief. After that time Mr. Roche contributed to the magazines both prose and poetry, and published several books, among which are Songs and Satires; Story of the Filibusters; Life of John Boyle O’Reilly; and Ballads of Blue Water. As a writer of light satirical verses and of ballads of the sea and of sea warfare, he had few equals among contemporaneous poets.
