Writing in the 1820s, William Hazlitt defined the ‘spirit of the age’ as ‘the progress of intellectual refinement, warring with our natural infirmities’. This two-part definition identifies the age with the kind of dialectical movements that have often since been taken to characterise the decade: progress and anxiety, reform and reaction, secularism and millenarianism – to name a few. The definition appears in Hazlitt's essay ‘On the Pleasure of Hating’, published in The Plain Speaker (1826) but written three years earlier, around the time that Hazlitt began the series of magazine portraits that appeared under the heading ‘The Spirits of the Age’. This series launched with an essay on Jeremy Bentham in the New Monthly Magazine for January 1824 and would be gathered in a single volume as The Spirit of the Age (1825). In ‘On the Pleasure of Hating’, Hazlitt's evocation of the spirit of his age appears outside of the biographical form it would later come to be associated with; here, instead, the parenthetical definition is glossed by a discussion (as so often in Hazlitt) of deep-seated political and religious feeling:

Even when the spirit of the age (that is, the progress of intellectual refine-ment, warring with our natural infirmities) no longer allows us to carry our vindictive and headstrong humours into effect, we try to revive them in description, and keep up the old bugbears, the phantoms of our terror and our hate, in imagination. We burn Guy Faux in effigy … subscribe to new editions of Fox's Book of Martyrs; and the secret of the success of the Scotch Novels is much the same—they carry us back to the feuds, the heart-burnings, the havoc, the dismay, the wrongs and the revenge of a barbarous age and people—to the rooted prejudices and deadly animosities of sects and parties in politics and religion, and of contending chiefs and clans in war and intrigue.

Hazlitt's vivid account of the pleasures of hating and the residual force of ‘rooted prejudices’, undermining the progress of refinement, emphasises the way that sectarian feeling continues to operate, in custom and culture. In this essay, I want to use this conception of the spirit of the age as a means of thinking about the relative status of poetry and song in the 1820s and the way that both are shaped by a schismatic religious imaginary.