“I do not appeal to busy folks to study Shakespeare. I just say to you— Read him and enjoy him; read his works over; read the best of them, or those you like the best, and then read them over again, and keep on,” Meighen said with great passion. “You will discover that each time you like them better; that each time you get more out of them. There is nourishment for mind and soul rich and various all along his shores. You will find yourself gaining possession of a storehouse which is adding light and charm to your everyday existence. You will find yourself thinking more of your species, more of your friends and more of your enemies. You will realize that this man understood all of them; that he saw to the very depths of all of them; that he did not hate them but loved them, and that he loved them, if for no other reason, just because they were part of the great panorama and that every one of them added something to the astounding spectacle of creation. There never has been anything in all history more engaging than the fathomless sympathy of Shakespeare.”

While lengthy, I have placed Meighen’s introduction to his famed address below, a fitting tribute to the late PM’s speechmaking skills in this, the past PM’s 150^th birthday year.

Rt. Hon. Arthur Meighen: If one can find in the speeches of D’Arcy McGee a portrayal of any great figure, it is certain to be striking and impressive. Seventy-two years ago, on the occasion of the three hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth, this great Canadian said: “I come as a debtor to acknowledge his accounts to his creditor, as a pupil to pay homage to his master, as a poor relation to celebrate the birthday of the founder of his house, as a good citizen to confess his indebtedness to a great public benefactor, as an heir-at-law to repay, in ever so imperfect a manner, his obligations to a wealthy testator who has left him riches he could never hope to acquire by any labour or exertions of his own.”

In such a spirit does every student of Shakespeare approach his shrine. Students he has had, and many, all through this long stretch of time and in every land on earth, but to the rank of student in its proper sense I do not dare to aspire. For half a century I have read his works with the ardour of a devotee, and it is the testimony of a lover rather than the learning of a critic which I desire to bring you today.

My life, like that of most of you here, has been spent in the busy battlefield of public affairs. In literature I am only a layman and it is to laymen alone that I have a right to speak. But for years I wanted, and opportunity finally came, to satisfy what seemed a sense of obligation; to reach back among giants of long ago and put my hand in gratitude on the man, who, more than any other of all the bounteous past, had contributed to make my own life worthwhile to myself, to bring light and warmth and joy to those pilgrimages of the mind which fill one’s quiet hours.

What I seek to do is to pay tribute in my own way to him who appears to me to have quaffed most deeply and passed around most generously the very wine of life and to have left to us of later times the richest legacy of all the dead.

This is an age of cinemas and sport. Those diversions on which our fathers thrived are not at all in general acceptance now. It is well to remember that there is no law of inevitable betterment applicable to our race. It should be our constant endeavour to get the most out of our time, for the road downward is easier than the road upward. After all accumulations of wealth and harvests of science, good literature is still our finest possession, and reading it vastly the most profitable occupation of our leisure. My hope is to do something, be it ever so little, to re-awaken interest in the very best of its treasures, the writings of William Shakespeare.

It may as well be said quite frankly now that I am not going to moderate my language below the level of unparalleled veneration which I feel for the memory of this man. There are those who say that enthusiasts of Shakespeare are always searching for superlatives and leave their senses by the wayside. Maybe so! Ben Jonson, who lived with him, said that he loved him to the very borders of idolatry. I join with hosts of others, who know him only from his works, in the same paean of affection.

Admittedly there are imperfections in his writings; sometimes he was hasty or careless, inartistic in his puns and quibbles, even once in awhile inconsistent. But these things are only spots on the sun; they are merely incident to the glorious freedom with which he traversed our world of fact and fancy. He swung through his work with a joyous strength and did not always stop to complete the finishing and polishing.

Let us look first at the biggest fact of all about him. By common consent of leading critics of many nations, by an acclaim which can now be said to approach the universal, Shakespeare stands as the greatest intellect of whom we have record in the literature of the world. That, I know, is an assertion sweeping and challenging, but in support of it one can call an array of witnesses more formidable than was ever gathered to endorse any other verdict given on this earth as to the comparative achievements of men—Carlyle, Macaulay, Emerson, Browning, Dumas, Goethe, Ruskin, Oliver Wendell Holmes—and behind these the chorus of an unnumbered throng of lovers of literature in every land.

No one is loved, though, just because he is a genius, and we do not read men long unless we like them. We have to look at the elements and attributes of his genius, and, through both, to the man himself. When we speak of great intellect, we at once enquire—Well, what doctrine did he preach? What were his views on religion, or the principles of government? What light was he able to throw on the overwhelming mystery of existence?

I have read and revelled in everything Shakespeare wrote, and I have not found any doctrine that he preached or tried to preach. No man ever known was farther from bondage to theory or dogma or slogan. He had a definite mission. What he lived for was to reveal human life as it is, ourselves, our friends, the high, the low, the great, the little, on fortune’s tide, in sorrow’s plight, conduct, character, and their changes under the buffetings of fate; and this he did with an understanding so luminous, so powerful that it passes the mortal frontiers of admiration, and with a sympathy as boundless as the globe.

What makes it of value to us, besides the rich enjoyment we get from it, is this: We find our interest in our fellow beings quickened; we find it growing broader and deeper and more wholesome. Out of it all we emerge, without any particular explanations advanced or special ideas established, but we do feel surer than we ever did that it is worthwhile to live, that there is always at hand an eternal common sense ready for the using, which will see us through, and that everywhere there is a right and a wrong, a good and a bad, and that the good is to be loved and the bad to be avoided and deplored.

I do not appeal to busy folks to study Shakespeare. I just say to you— Read him and enjoy him; read his works over; read the best of them, or those you like the best, and then read them over again, and keep on. You will discover that each time you like them better; that each time you get more out of them. There is nourishment for mind and soul rich and various all along his shores. You will find yourself gaining possession of a storehouse which is adding light and charm to your everyday existence. You will find yourself thinking more of your species, more of your friends and more of your enemies. You will realize that this man understood all of them; that he saw to the very depths of all of them; that he did not hate them but loved them, and that he loved them, if for no other reason, just because they were part of the great panorama and that every one of them added something to the astounding spectacle of creation. There never has been anything in all history more engaging than the fathomless sympathy of Shakespeare.

If he does not come to you with a solution of the riddle of existence, you will never conclude that he has not explored and wrestled with this problem, as, of course, everyone has. No mind ever travelled farther than his into the darkness. He sailed all the seas of human thought and encountered all the storms, and saw the great miracle more closely than did any man of whom we have record. So truly splendid and majestic is his vision that he seems at times to be expressing an inner and infinite harmony appertaining to the very universe. But whatever his subject, whatever stage he mounts, he is immediately master of the scene. As soon as he enters an arena his mind sets everything in order, and it is not the order of the trim garden or the carefully elaborated show; it is the order of nature herself.

What I want earnestly to impress is this: that in Shakespeare sheer intellect is the essence but only the essence of his genius. It is adorned by a generosity of character, by a magnanimity which makes his mind a very heaven of hospitality. You like to go with him on his excursions; you know that you will have lots of joy and lots of tears, and, though you may come back a mystic, you certainly will not come back a cynic. The rest of what I have to say will be less general and less analytical. Its purpose will be to have you enjoy some of the more obvious values of this man’s productions, some things nearer the surface and to be found on any one of hundreds out of the thousands of his pages.

Arthur Milnes is an accomplished public historian and award-winning journalist. He was research assistant on The Rt. Hon. Brian Mulroney’s best-selling Memoirs and also served as a speechwriter to then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper and as a Fellow of the Queen’s Centre for the Study of Democracy under the leadership of Tom Axworthy. A resident of Kingston, Ontario, Milnes serves as the in-house historian at the 175 year-old Frontenac Club Hotel.