Date: 1782

"Oh! lads, beware the month of May;--for you blest girls--nature decked out--as in a birth-day suit--courts you with all its sweets--where-e'er you tread--the grass and wanton flowerets fondly kiss your feet--and humbly bow their pretty heads--to the gentle sweepings of your under-petticoats--the...

— Sancho, Charles Ignatius (1729-1780)

Date: 1783

"Learn hence, that husbands will be blind / To every beauty but the mind; / Great Venus there should hold her court; / should the Loves and Graces sport / There rapture beam'd in every feature, / Bound by that Cestus, called Good Nature."

— Dibdin, Charles (bap. 1745, d. 1814)

Date: 1785

Jealousy's monsters may hurl "frighted Reason from her throne, / And with her all the charities that wait / To grace her virtuous Court"

— Pratt, Samuel Jackson [pseud. Courtney Melmoth] (1749-1814)

Date: 1785

When Passion dwells in the heart it is "Pleasure's court"

— Lovibond, Edward (bap. 1723, d. 1775)

Date: 1789, 1792

"The tops of these scarce veil'd the roots of those; / A winding court where wandering fancy walk'd / And to herself responsive Echo talk'd."

— Brooke, Henry (c. 1703-1783)

Date: 1789, 1791, 1799

"Throned in the vaulted heart, his dread resort, / Inexorable Conscience holds his court"

— Darwin, Erasmus (1731-1802)

Date: 1791

"The mind, like the body, he observed, delighted in change and novelty, and even in religion itself, courted new appearances and modifications."

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: 1792

"But souls in common are a dreary waste, / By brambles, thistles, barb'rous docks disgrac'd; / That need the ploughshare, harrow, and the fire--"

— Wolcot, John, pseud. Peter Pindar, (1738-1819)

Date: 1793

"From that time he was mortified at the court of Burgundy by the nick-name of the booted head. Comines felt the wound in his mind."

— Disraeli, Isaac (1766-1848)

Date: 1794

"[T]he thing in which my imagination revelled the most freely, was the analysis of the private and internal operations of the mind, employing my metaphysical dissecting knife in tracing and laying bare the involutions of motive, and recording the gradually accumulating impulses."

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)