Charles Lamb, writing to Coleridge in 1802, bitterly resents her popularity: “Goody Two Shoes” he says, “is almost out of print. Mrs. Barbauld’s stuff has banished all the old classics of the nursery, and the shopman at Newbery’s hardly deigned to reach them off an old exploded corner of the shelf when Mary asked for them. Mrs. Barbauld’s and Mrs. Trimmer’s nonsense lay in piles about. Knowledge, insignificant and vapid as Mrs. Barbauld’s books convey, it seems must come to a child in the shape of knowledge; and his empty noddle must be turned with conceit of his own powers when he has learnt that a horse is an animal, and Billy is better than a horse, and such like, instead of _that beautiful interest in wild tales_, which made the child a man, while all the time he suspected himself to be no bigger than a child. Science has succeeded to poetry no less in the little walks of children than with men. Is there no possibility of averting this sore evil? Think what you would have been now, if instead of being fed with tales and old wives’ fables in childhood, you had been crammed with Geography and Natural History!”