The first number of _The Liberal_ appeared October 15, 1822. There were three subsequent numbers. Byron's contributions were his brilliant and masterly satire, the _Vision of Judgment_, _Heaven and Earth_, _A Letter to the Editor of my Grandmother's Review_, _The Blues_, and his translation of the first canto of Pulci's _Morgante Maggiore_. Murray had withheld the preface to the _Vision of Judgment_ and this omission, combined with an unwise announcement in _The Examiner_ of September 29, 1822, by John Hunt, made the reception even worse than it might otherwise have been. Hunt said the _Vision of Judgment_ "played the devil with all of us."[414] Shelley had made ready for the forthcoming magazine his exquisite translation of Goethe's _May Day Night_ and a prose narrative, _A German Apologue_. These appeared in the first number. Hunt's best contributions were two poems, _Lines to a Spider_ and _Mahmoud_. _Letters from Abroad_ are good in spots only. His two satires, _The Dogs_ and _The Book of Beginners_, are pale reflections in meter and tone of _Don Juan_ and _Beppo_ combined. The _Florentine Lovers_ is a good story spoiled. _Rhyme and Reason_, _The Guili Tre_, and the rest are purely hack work, with the possible exceptions of the translation from Ariosto and the modernization of the _Squire's Tale_. Hazlitt contributed _Pulpit Oratory_, _On the Spirit of Monarchy_, a pithy dissertation _On the Scotch Character_, and a delightful reminiscence of Coleridge in _My First Acquaintance with Poets_. Mrs. Shelley wrote _A Tale of the Passions_, _Mme. D'Houdetot_, and _Giovanni Villani_, all rather stilted and heavy. Charles Browne contributed _Shakespear's Fools_. A number of unidentified prose articles and poems, many of the latter translations from Alfieri, completed the list.