John Brown (1715-1766). Praising him as “the first who led the way to a worthy admiration
of this country,” Wordsworth probably recalls Brown’s A Description of the Lake at Keswick (1767), a book mentioned by name later in the Guide. Brown’s “Now Sunk the Sun” first appeared in Richard Cumberland’s Odes (1776) and was reprinted in West’s Guide, editions 2–11, where Wordsworth may have encountered it (Wu, Wordsworth’s Reading, 1770–1799, 19). The poem also appeared in various contemporary anthologies, identified as a
“rhapsody” inspired by the Westmorland lakes.

Wordsworth quotes from Thomas West’s The Antiquities of Furness (1774).

The friend is Thomas Wilkinson of Yanwath, a local antiquary. See Owen and Smyser
for more details on Wilkinson and the story Wordsworth tells here.

From Wordsworth’s sonnet, “The Monument Commonly Called Long Meg and her Daughter,
near the River Eden,” composed 1821 and first published in A Description of the Scenery of the Lakes (the first stand-alone edition of the Guide and the third edition overall, 1822). A revised version later appeared in Yarrow Revisited as one of the 1833 itinerary poems.

I.e., Thomas West. Wordsworth once again quotes West’s Antiquities of Furness (1774), as he clarifies two pages later. This is by far the longest direct quotation
in the Guide, further suggesting Wordsworth’s regard for West.

Wordsworth loosely quotes The History and Antiquities of the Counties of Westmorland and Cumberland by Joseph Nicolson and Richard Burn (2 vols, 1777), vol. 1, p. 498.

Like other editors before us, we cannot locate the source for this quotation. It seems
likely that Wordsworth is recalling West’s history of the bloomeries in The Antiquities of Furness.

Presented in various sources during Wordsworth’s lifetime as a fragment of the unfinished
Recluse, these lines are now most commonly known as part of “Home at Grasmere.” They were
composed in 1800 and eventually published as “On Nature’s Invitation do I Come” in
1851. Several subsequent nineteenth-century guidebook writers quoted these lines.