The whole later career of the Mantuan poet as an accomplished and not unsuccessful man of the world, as the friend of Raymond of Toulouse and Charles of Anjou, rewarded with ample estates by the latter for substantial services,--is either rejected as myth, or purposely ignored.

To all appearance, the actual Sordello by no means lacked ability to "fit to the finite" such "infinity" as he possessed.

And if he had the chance, as is obscurely hinted at the close, of becoming, like Dante, the "Apollo" of the Italian people, he hardly missed it "through disbelief that anything was to be done." But the outward shell of his career included some circumstances which, had they befallen a Dante, might have deeply moulded the history of Italy.

His close relations with great Guelph and Ghibelline families would have offered extraordinary opportunities to a patriot of genius, which, for the purposes of patriotism, remained unused.

Yet Dante, a patriot of genius if ever there was one, had given Sordello a position of extraordinary honour in the _Purgatory_, had allowed him to illuminate the darkness of Virgil, and to guide both the great poets towards the Gate.