His name will never rival that of his father, but his sentiments were no less honest. The ObserverFOR ALL their wealth, power and glamour, few dynasties have suffered so much ill fortune Yesterday, fate claimed another Kennedy. Two cliches, certainly, but it doesn't make them any the less true. This sad weekend, we can only hope that the message left by John Fitzgerald Kennedy is taken to heart by good and thoughtful Americans. Charmed, cursed, beautiful and Gothically dysfunctional, the Kennedy clan probably is America's royal family And the next century will be America's. THE IRONIES are fierce, the juxtapositions as tragic as any we have come to expect in this benighted century. For want of better employment I began several plans of scribbling, but have been wise enough to destroy them all except the poem of which you recollect I had finished two cantos, to which I have added nothing -'Extract from a letter Byron wrote from Athens to John Cam Hobhouse, dated 28 February 1811; it was never seen by Marchand and is published here for the first time since 1856. Hodgson [another special friend] and you send me nothing at all, and unless indeed, you can say something more to the purpose than the others, I am very much obliged to you.I have been ill and well, and sick and sorry, and glad, and coming, going and staying, like the rest of mankind, without gaining a step towards improvement except in languages, and even there my head is but a Babel of bad sounds.

I remember a special day with him about 30 years ago, when together we explored the marble quarries of Pentelikon.Marchand is survived by his wife Marion, with whom he spent many happy years.Leslie Alexis Marchand, scholar of English literature and writer: born Bridgeport, Washington 13 February 1900; Professor, English and French, Alaska Agricultural College and School of Mines 1923-27 and 1934-35; Lecturer, Columbia University 1936-37; Instructor, Rutgers University 1937-42, Assistant Professor 1942-46, Associate Professor 1946-53, Professor 1953-66 (Emeritus); Fulbright Professor, University of Athens 1958-59; married 1950 Marion Hendrix; died Englewood, Florida 11 July 1999.`My mother sends me a pack of stale newspaper extracts, which one sees in every seaport town - Hanson [his lawyer] a damnable account of my affairs though I can't tell if he tells truth or not, his letter being quite facetious, a pretty time for joking when a man is in Greece and his property involved. It is from Athens, dated 28 February 1811, and is addressed to his friend Hobhouse. It includes a reference to Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, the work which when published the following March caused Byron to say "I woke up and found myself famous".Like his subject Marchand developed a special love for Greece, visiting frequently in the post-war years, including a year as Byron Professor in Athens. At the Byron Bicentenary Conference in 1988 when Marchand was already 88 - in appearance he scarcely changed during much of his life - he delivered an excellent paper. When the applause died down, he remarked, "when you get to my age, you only have to sneeze to get a cheer."He was in good health right to the end, and was looking forward to his hundredth birthday.

As a little present I had intended to send him the text of a part of an unpublished letter from Byron, one of the very few that have come to light in recent years since he completed his researches. He could tell a forgery at a glance from the style as well as from the handwriting. Most important of all, he was sympathetic to, and he understood, that indefinable mixture of seriousness, irony, fun, and self-awareness that Byron brought to everything he wrote.In later years, as a grand old man of scholarship, admired by generations still unborn when he did his main work, there were attempts to turn Marchand himself into a Byronic figure But he would have none of it. Seldom has a biographer been more modest, keeping well in the background, avoiding making unnecessary or definitive judgements, and offering no overarching psycho-logical or theoretical explanations.At first acquaintance, he himself seemed personally not in the least Byronic, with little of the romantic flamboyance of his subject But Marchand knew his man. The first draft of his book, in which he included his findings, was three times as long as the final version.

If it had been printed in full it would have been 3,000 pages long.Marchand's approach to biography was to transcribe, to understand and contextualise the original documents, to reconstruct the essential historical facts which they pointed to, and to allow Byron to speak for himself. Travel in Greece, especially in the area near Missolonghi where Byron had met his death in 1824, was still dangerous as well as uncomfortable, but then so had it been for Byron on both his visits.Everywhere Marchand went he was welcomed and everywhere throughout his life he found new material. In a shop in Surrey he found and was able to buy half a dozen notebooks and commonplace books written by Byron's wife Annabella, which had been disposed of as of no value by the owners of the big house nearby.From England Marchand followed the Byronic trail to Switzerland, to Italy, and then to Greece, where the bitter civil war had not yet ended. As part of his research project, Marchand wanted to build his own library of Byron books and visited the bookshops on the way.