Prescott, Spenser/Ronsard 1 The Laurel and the Myrtle De Myrte et de Laurier fueille à fueille enserrez Helene entrelassant une belle Couronne, M'appella par mon nom: "Voyla que je vous donne: Do moy seule, Ronsard, l'escrivain vous serez." (Pierre de Ronsard, Les Amours de Helene II.57) Happy ye leaves when as those lilly hands, which hold my life in their dead doing might shall handle you and hold in loves soft bands, lyke captives trembling at the victors sight. (Edmund Spenser, Amoretti 1) It is a scholarly commonplace to say that even as he masked in lowly shepherds' weeds for the 1579 Shepheardes Calender Spenser was gesturing at a laureate Virgilian career. Had Virgil not begun as a pastoral poet? Virgil was not, though, the only poet whose career Spenser would have traced with interest. For sheer worldly glamour at court, or for what seemed such to others, he would have known that there was no contemporary writer to equal Pierre de Ronsard (1521-1585). As he thought about French writers, Spenser's heart may have gone out more warmly to Clément Marot, two of whose eclogues he adapted for the Calender , and to Joachim Du Bellay, whose imagination in some regards resembled and perhaps helped shape his own and some of whose sonnets he would translate in the 1591 Complaints as "The Ruines of Rome." Evidently, too, he admired the biblical poetry of Guillaume Du Bartas (and perhaps envied that aristocratic poet's friendships with the kings of Scotland and Navarre). But it was Ronsard who, more than any other modern author of approximately his own generation, wrote in almost all culturally available poetic genres, including sonnet sequences, masques, formal odes, Anacreontics, neo-Homeric or Orphic hymns, elegies, epitaphs, epistles, and such erotica as a remarkable sonnet on the vagina. He was, as he put it, the first in France to "Pindarize"; even when he was young, some of his love poetry was printed with admiring commentary by the up-and-coming humanist Marc-Antoine Muret, and not, like the similar notes in the Calender , by a mere