This was one of Wordsworth’s favorite passages, as evidenced by how frequently he
quotes it elsewhere in his writings.

Thomas Gray died two years after the 1769 publication of his Tour of the English Lakes. For more on Gray’s Tour, see the introductory essay.

In 1771 Dr. John Brown published A Description of the Lake at Keswick (and the Adjacent Country) in Cumberland: Communicated
in a Letter to a Friend, by a Late Popular Writer. Earlier in the Guide, Wordsworth reprints Brown’s twenty-line “fragment” on the Vale of Keswick in its
entirety. Owen and Smyser note: “In his own day, Dr. John Brown (1715-1766) was best
known for an immensely popular work entitled An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times (London, 1757); after his death, however, he became important among writers on the
Picturesque for his brief, but impressive, description around Keswick.”

See introductory essay on the history of Lake District tourism.

The English school of ornamental gardening is generally associated with Lancelot “Capability”
Brown (1715-1783).

Roughly 1770 (the year of Wordsworth’s birth), as Wordsworth says 60 years in the
1822 and 1835 editions, 50 in 1820, 40 in 1810.

Source unknown. Possibly modeled on Proverbs 27:10: “Thine own friend, and thy father's
friend, forsake not; neither go into thy brother’s house in the day of thy calamity:
for better is a neighbour that is near than a brother far off.”

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).

The religion (or holiness) of the place. Wordsworth probably expects readers to ingest
this phrase on analogy with “genius loci.” In any case, his primary comparison is
between the ethos of the little churches he has described and the “religion” of local
nature itself.