Wordsworth here echoes Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard: “Let not Ambition mock their useful toil, / Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;
/ Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile, / The short and simple annals of the
poor” (29–32). Wordsworth expresses sentiments similar to those presented here in
his Essays Upon Epitaphs (written in 1809 and 1810, at about the same time as the letterpress for Select Views).