Sora´no, a Neapolitan noble, brother of Evanthe (3 syl.) “the wife for a month,” and the infamous instrument of Frederick, the licentious brother of Alphonso, king of Naples.--Beaumont and Fletcher, A Wife for a Month (1624).
Sordello, a Provençal poet, whom Dantê meets in purgatory, sitting apart. On seeing Virgil, Sordello springs forward to embrace him.
⁂ R. Browning has a poem called Sordello, and makes Sordello typical of liberty and human perfectibility.
Sorel (Agnes), surnamed La dame de Beauté, not from her personal beauty, but from the “château de Beauté,” on the banks of the Marne, given to her by Charles VII. (1409-1450).
Sorento (in Naples), the birthplace of Torquato Tasso, the Italian poet.
Sorrows of Werther, a mawkish, sentimental novel by Goethe (1774), once extremely popular. Werther, the hero of the story, loves a married woman, and becomes disgusted with life because Charlotte [Lotte] is the wife of his friend, Kestner.
Werther, infusing itself into the core and whole spirit of literature, gave birth to a race of sentimentalists, who raged and wailed in every part of the world till better light dawned on them, or, at any rate, till exhausted nature laid itself to sleep, and it was discovered that lamenting was an unproductive labor.--Carlyle.
Sosia (in Molière, Sosie), the slave of Amphitryon. When Mercury assumes the form of Sosia, and Jupiter that of Amphitryon, the mistakes and confusion which arise resemble those of the brothers Antiph´olus and their servants, the brothers Dromio, in Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors.--Plautus, Molière (1668), and Dryden (1690), Amphitryon.
His first name ... looks out upon him like another Sosia, or as if a man should suddenly encounter his own duplicate.--C. Lamb.
Sosii, brothers, the name of two booksellers at Rome, referred to by Horace.