Date: 1762-3

The five senses may "Allow [Reason] to retain the name / Of Royalty, and, as in sport, / To hold a mimic formal court, / Permitted (no uncommon thing) / To be a kind of puppet-king, / And suffer'd, by the way of toy, / To hold a globe, but not employ"

— Churchill, Charles (1731-1764)

Date: 1767, 1778

"Envy in courts and cottages will dwell, / Nay climb to heaven itself, tho' born in hell: / In every living bosom lurks this pest, / But reigns unrival'd in the human breast; / On reason's throne usurps a thorny part, / And plants a thousand daggers in the heart."

— Jones, Henry (1721-1770)

Date: 1726, 1781

In Bedlam a "shiv'ring Monarch keeps his awful Court, / And far and wide, as boundless Thought can stray, / Extends a vast imaginary Sway"

— Fitzgerald, Thomas (1695-1752)

Date: 1660, 1676

"That is, of that which God hath declared to be good or evil respectively, the conscience is to be informed. God hath taken care that his laws shall be published to all his subjects, he hath written them where they must needs read them, not in Tables of stone or Phylacteries on the forehead, but ...

— Taylor, Jeremy (bap. 1613, 1667)

Date: 1762-3

"With these grave fops, whose system seems / To give up certainty for dreams / The eye of man is understood / As for no other purpose good / Than as a door, through which, of course, / Their passage crowding objects force; / A downright usher, to admit / New-comers to the court of Wit."

— Churchill, Charles (1731-1764)

Date: 1762-3

"(Good Gravity! forbear thy spleen, / When I say wit, I wisdom mean) / Where, (such the practice of the court, / Which legal precedents support) / Not one idea is allow'd / To pass unquestion'd in the crowd, / But ere it can obtain the grace / Of holding in the brain a place, / Before the chief i...

— Churchill, Charles (1731-1764)

Date: 1710, 1714

"As cruel a Court as the Inquisition appears; there must, it seems, be full as formidable a one, erected in our-selves; if we wou'd pretend to that Uniformity of Opinion which is necessary to hold us to one Will, and preserve us in the same Mind, from one day to another."

— Cooper, Anthony Ashley, third earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713)

Date: 1759

"Mark well the Passion, that most rules his Heart, / By courting that, you may rule him with Art; / You may his ruling Passion govern so, / 'Twill be your constant Friend, instead of Foe."

— Marriott, Thomas (d. 1766)

Date: 1684, 1717

"Fancy sits Queen of all; / While the poor under-Faculties resort, / And to her fickle Majesty make Court"

— Duke, Richard (1658-1711)

Date: 1684, 1717

The understanding is first to pay court to Queen Fancy, "plainly clad,
But usefully; no Ent'rance to be had"

— Duke, Richard (1658-1711)