The most damning and lasting criticism, however, came from the Romantic essayist Charles Lamb in a letter to the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge:  This quote was used by writers and scholars to condemn Barbauld and other educational writers for a century. As Myers argues:  It is only in the 1990s and 2000s that Barbauld and other female educational writers are beginning to be acknowledged in the history of children's literature and, indeed, in the history of literature itself. As Myers points out, "the writing woman as teacher has not captured the imagination of feminist scholars", and Barbauld's children's works are usually consigned to "the backwaters of children's literature surveys, usually deplored for their pernicious effect on the emergent cultural construction of Romantic childhood, or in the margins of commentary on male high Romanticism, a minor inspiration for Blake or Wordsworth perhaps". The male Romantics did not explore didactic genres that illustrated educational progress; rather, as Myers explains, their works embodied a "nostalgia for lost youth and [a] pervasive valorization of instinctive juvenile wisdom" not shared by many female writers at this time. Serious scholarship is just beginning to investigate the complexities of Barbauld's "Lessons"; McCarthy, for example, has noted the resonances between "Lessons" and T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" that have yet to be explored: