Citations:due course

English citations of due course

Noun

		1590		1735 1769	1803 1850 1898
ME «	15th c.	16th c.	17th c.	18th c.	19th c.	20th c.	21st c.

1. (idiomatic) Regular or appropriate passage or occurrence
   • a. 1399, Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales

     You all know that in the due course of time / If you continue scratching on a stone, / Little by little some image thereon / Will he engraven.

   • 1590, William Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale

     Let us be cleared / Of being tyrannous, since we so openly / Proceed in justice, which shall have due course, / Even to the guilt or the purgation.

   • a. 1735, Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels

     This is all according to the due Course of Things: […].

   • a. 1769, Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

     What I have to inform you, comes, I own, a little out of its due course; […].

   • a. 1803, Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

     […] but it did not oppress them by any means so long; and, after a due course of useless conjecture, that “it was a strange business, and that he must be a very strange man,” grew enough for all their indignation and wonder; […].

   • 1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

     Day by day, nevertheless, their sour and rigid wrinkles were relaxing into something which, in the due course of years, might grow to be an expression of almost benevolence.

   • 1898, Justin McCarthy, The Story of Gladstone's Life, page 27

     The Reform Bill, although the Duke of Wellington described it as " a revolution by due course of law," set up in fact but a very limited suffrage, [....]