They corresponded with each other about literary matters, and Harvey published his part of the correspondence; they played like Du Bellay in France, with the idea of writing English verse in the quantitative measures of classical poetry; Spenser had a love affair in Yorkshire and wrote poetry about it, letting just enough be known to stimulate the imagination of the public.
They tried their hands at everything, imitated everything, and in all were brilliant, sparkling, and decorative; they got a kind of entrance to the circle of the Court.

Then Spenser published his _Shepherd's Calendar_, a series of pastoral eclogues for every month of the year, after a manner taken from French and Italian pastoral writers, but coming ultimately from Vergil, and Edward Kirke furnished it with an elaborate prose commentary.

Spenser took the same liberties with the pastoral form as did Vergil himself; that is to say he used it as a vehicle for satire and allegory, made it carry political and social allusions, and planted in it references to his friends.

By its publication Spenser became the first poet of the day.

It was followed by some of his finest and most beautiful things--by the Platonic hymns, by the _Amoretti_, a series of sonnets inspired by his love for his wife; by the _Epithalamium_, on the occasion of his marriage to her; by _Mother Hubbard's Tale_, a satire written when despair at the coldness of the Queen and the enmity of Burleigh was beginning to take hold on the poet and endowed with a plainness and vigour foreign to most of his other work--and then by _The Fairy Queen_.
The poets of the Renaissance were not afraid of big things; every one of them had in his mind as the goal of poetic endeavour the idea of the heroic poem, aimed at doing for his own country what Vergil had intended to do for Rome in the _Aeneid_, to celebrate it--its origin, its prowess, its greatness, and the causes of it, in epic verse.