First had come Oehlenschläger's East. This was the East of the child, of the fairy-tale book, of the _Thousand and One Nights_--half Persia, half Copenhagen. It was dreams of genii in lamps and rings, of diamonds and sapphires by the bushel, the illimitable splendours of imagination all grouped round a few imperishable poetic types. Then came Byron's East, a great decorative background for passion in its recklessness and melancholy. The third in order was Goethe's, the East of the _West-östlicher Divan_, the refuge of the old man. He took the reposeful, the contemplative element of Oriental philosophy and wove German Lieder into it. Rückert, the great word-artist, followed in his steps. But Hugo's East was different from all of these; it was the brightly variegated, outward, barbaric East, the land of light and colour. Sultans and muftis, dervishes and caliphs, hetmans, pirates, Klephts--delicious sounds in his ears, delightful pictures before his eyes. Time is a matter of indifference--far back antiquity, Middle Ages, or to-day; race is a matter of indifference--Hebrew, Moor, or Turk; place is a matter of indifference--Sodom and Gomorrah, Granada, Navarino; creed is a matter of indifference. "No one," he tells us in his preface, "has a right to ask the poet whether he believes in God or in gods, in Pluto, in Satan, or in nothing." His province is to paint. He is possessed by a genius which leaves him no peace until the East, as he feels it, is before him upon paper. A careful study of the _Orientales_ shows us how they came into being. They were not written in the order in which they stand in the book. The first poem in order of production is No. 23, "La ville prise," written in 1824; next come poems written in 1826 and 1827 upon incidents in the War of Liberation, and not until 1828 is the poet's imagination thoroughly fired. The horizon widens; all the elements which tend, by reason of a close or distant connection of ideas, to crystallise round the Turkish war, group themselves round that nucleus. If we examine the little poem, "La ville prise," which is an outcome of the powerful emotion produced in the poet by the martyrdom of Greece, we are struck by the identity of its standpoint with the standpoint of the French Romantic school of painting. In 1824 Eugène Delacroix exhibits his famous picture of the "Massacre of Scio," a bold and masterly delineation, glowing with flaming colour and intense feeling, of a horrible incident, destitute of the slightest element of conventional poetic justice. Very soon after this Hugo writes his little poem. It purports to be the intelligence brought by a humble slave. Standing with his hands crossed on his breast, he says: "La flamme par ton ordre, ô Roi, luit et dévore. De ton peuple en grondant elle étouffe les cris; Et, rougissant les toits comme une sombre aurore, Semble en son vol joyeux danser sur leurs débris.