ROUCHERJean Antoine (1745-1794), a French poet, to whom a melancholy fate and some descriptive verse equal to anything written during at least three-quarters of a century by any of his countrymen except André Chénier, gave some reputation, was born on February 17, 1745 at Montpellier, and perished by the guillotine at Paris on July 25, 1794. He wrote an epithalamium on Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette, gained the favour of Turgot, and obtained a salt-tax collector-ship. His main poem was entitled Les Mois ; it appeared in 1779, was praised in MS., damned in print, and restored to a just appreciation by the students of literature of the present century. It has the drawbacks of merely didactic-descriptive poetry on the great scale, but much grace and spirit in parts. Roucher was by no means antirevolutionary, but ill-luck and perhaps his unpopular employment made him a victim of the Revolution. He lay in prison for nearly a year before his death, and went to it on the same tumbril with Chénier. The malicious wit of RivaroVs mot on the ill-success of Les Mois, “C’est le plus beau naufrage du siècle,” is not intelligible unless it is said that one of the most elaborate passages describes a shipwreck.