The unusual style of the inscription came to the attention of historians, most famously James Mosley, whose work The Nymph and the Grot on early sans-serif lettering is named after it.

[5][6][a] Mosley has concluded that he cannot be certain of the source of the style and that it does not seem to have influenced successors, but that its unusual, simplified structure may be an "exercise in rusticity" related to the spirit of the construction, intended to imitate a natural cave.

[5][11] Being based on the Stourhead inscription makes National Trust a "stressed" or "modulated" sans-serif, with a clear difference between horizontal and vertical stroke widths.

The four line poem, translated into English from Latin by Alexander Pope, was attributed to an inscription on a legendary Roman fountain with a statue of a sleeping nymph above the River Danube.

[9][14][15] The motif of a sleeping nymph besides a fountain was popular with Renaissance humanists and influential among neoclassical garden designers, but is now generally suspected to be a fifteenth-century forgery.