due course

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due course (plural due courses)

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.

   • 1726 October 28, [Jonathan Swift], chapter XII, in Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. […] [Gulliver’s Travels], volume II, London: Printed for Benj[amin] Motte, […], OCLC 995220039, part IV (A Voyage to the Houyhnhnms):

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

   • 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; […].

   • 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, [....]

• For quotations of use of this term, see Citations:due course.