When Wordsworth writes, as he does often and compellingly, so as to stand back from his authorship, he thinks of predecessors and their legacy more than most other poets either then or now. Yet though his critical reflections have an obvious stake in earlier practices, they can be just as good at covering their tracks as they are at extending them. To launch its second, more adventurous line of thought against the primacy of the distinguished life, the Elegy's rejection of memorial pride becomes more openly conjectural. For the most part, the literary history of Gray and Wordsworth has encouraged people to think of their respective works, as placed by key pronouncements and not least by the later poet's own account, as largely incommensurate. Wordsworth attends to the perhaps confusing lack of epitaphic properties first by explaining how they ought ideally to merge personal appreciation, even love, with "universal" sympathies that would extend to all.