SOURCE: "One of Dante's Troubadours," in The American Catholic Quarterly Review, Vol. XXXV, No. 140, October, 1910, pp. 606-24.

In the following essay, Dunne contrasts three views of the character of Sordello—as revealed by a Provençal chronicler, by Dante in his Purgatorio, and by Browning in his poem Sordello—proposing that "the real Sordello lives in no one of the three."

I. the Sordel of the Chroniclers.

Sordel—a soft, uncertain, two syllabled cadence—we find the name on the illuminated pages of the Provença chroniclers; Sordello, stronger for the added vowel, we spell it out through the soft starlight of Dante's middle realm, and Sordello it remains through all the six cantos of Browning's marvelous unscrolling of the incidents in the development of a human soul. It was in the high suntide of the mediæval period that the historic Sordello first came into prominence. When...