 Oliver Wendell Holmes found it "capital—crammed full and rammed down hard—with powder (lots of it)—shot—slugs—very little wadding... all crowded into a rusty-looking sort of blunderbuss barrel, as it were—capped with a percussion preface—and cocked with a title page as apropos as a wink to a joke".Henry Wadsworth Longfellow compared it to Lord Byron's "English Bards" as being "full of wild wit and deviltry, and amazingly clever".Freeman Hunt reviewed the poem for "Merchants' Magazine" in December 1848 and remarked on how true the character assessments were