The rich man in his castle, The poor man at his gate, God made them, high or lowly, And ordered their estate.

-Alexander, Cecil Frances
  'All Things Bright and Beautiful'.

A legal gentleman who rescues your estate from your enemies, and keeps it himself.

-Vaux
His definitionof a lawyer. Quoted in Richard Fountain The Wit of the Wig (1968).

In case my godson Philip Stanhope shall at anytime keep or be concerned in keeping any racehorse or pack of hounds, or reside one night at Newmarket, that infamous seminary of iniquity and ill-manners, during the course of the races there, or shall resort to the said races or shall lose in one dayat any game or bet whatsoever the sum of »500 then in any of the cases aforesaid it is my express will that he, my said godson, shall forfeit and pay out of my estate the sum of »50,000 to and for the use of the Dean and Chapter of Westminster.

-Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of
  Clause in his will.

When physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, contribute to the detection of concrete human woes and to the development of plans for remedying them and relieving the human estate, they become moral; they become part of the apparatus of moral inquiry or science† When the consciousness of science is fully impregnated with the consciousness of human value, the greatest dualism which now weighs humanity down, the split between the material, the mechanical and the scientific and the moral and ideal will be destroyed.

-Dewey,John
  Reconstruction in Philosophy.

In squandering wealth was his peculiar art: Nothing went unrewarded, but desert. Beggared by fools, whom still he found too late: He had his jest, and they had his estate.

-Dryden,John
Absalom and  Achitophel, pt.1, l.559^62.

Fallen from his high estate, And welt'ring in his blood: Deserted at his utmost need By those his former bounty fed; On the bare earth expos'd he lies, With not a friend to close his eyes.

-Dryden,John
  Alexander's Feast, l.78^83.

The comfortable estate of widowhood, is the only hope that keeps up a wife's spirits.

-Gay,John
  The Beggar's Opera, act1, sc.10.

He is a kind of fourth estate in the politics of the country.

-Hazlitt,William
  Of the journalist and reformer William Cobbett. Spirit of the Age,'Mr Cobbett'.

The gallery in which the reporters sit has become a fourth estate of the realm. See Hazlitt 388:80.

-1st Baron
  'Hallam's Constitutional History' in the Edinburgh Review, Sep.

When I am grown to man's estate I shall be very proud and great, And tell the other girls and boys Not to meddle with my toys.

-Stevenson, Robert Louis
  A Child's Garden ofVerses, no.12,'Looking Forward'.

Dost thou look back on what hath been, As some divinely gifted man, Whose life in low estate began And on a simple village green; Who breaks his birth's invidious bar, And grasps the skirts of happy chance, And breasts the blows of circumstance, And grapples with his evil star.

-Tennyson
  In Memoriam A.H.H., canto 64, l.1^8.