SOURCE: "Sordello," in The Lives of the Troubadours, David Nutt, 1896, pp. 225-31.

In the following excerpt, Farnell attests to the significance of Sordello, citing the high esteem in which Dante held the poet as well as the energy and vitality of the poet's major works. Of these, the critic contends that "Lament for Lord Blacatz" demonstrates "originality and force."

The name of Sordel, or Sordello, is a household word among us, and the noble lines in Dante's Purgatorio, with the profound and complex character in Browning's poem, cannot but inspire one with a wish to know something of the Sordello of actual life. Yet, on turning to the scanty records, and to the poems left us of him, we are at first somewhat disconcerted. One of the biographies represents him as a false-hearted traitor, false both to the husband who gave him shelter, and to the wife whom...