Thanks, dear master-makers unawares! The gratitude of the few who understand you is no less sincere because you do not yet realize your own thankworthiness. Our children shall rise up and call you blessed. For in your quiet way, you have helped to create the world's creators--the preachers, prophets, captains, artists, discoverers, and seers of the ages. To these, you, unrecognized and unawares, have been providing the very sinews of peace, vision, war, beauty, originality, and insight. What made the game of art so brilliant in the age of Pericles? It was not star playing by individuals. It was steady, consistent team-work by the many. Almost every one of the Athenians who were not masters were masters by proxy. In "The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century" Chamberlain holds that Greek culture derived its incomparable charm from "a peculiar harmony of greatness"; and that "if our poets are not in every respect equal to the greatest poets of Athens, that is not the fault of their talent, but of those who surround them." Only imagine the joyful ease of being a poet in the Periclean atmosphere! It must have been as exhilarating as coasting down into the Yosemite Valley with John Muir on an avalanche of snow. But even in that enlightened age the master received all the credit for every achievement, and his creative appreciator none at all. And so it has been ever since that particular amoeba which was destined for manhood had a purse made up for him and was helped upon the train of evolution by his less fortunate and more self-effacing friends who were destined to remain amoebae; because the master by proxy is such a retiring, unspectacular sort of person that he has never caught the popular imagination or found any one to sing his praises. But if he should ever resent this neglect and go on strike, we should realize that without him progress is impossible. For the real lords of creation are not always the apparent lords. We should bear in mind that the most important part of many a throne is not the red velvet seat, the back of cloth of gold, or the onyx arms that so sumptuously accommodate the awe and majesty of acknowledged kings. Neither is it the seed-pearl canopy that intercepts a too searching light from majesty's complexion. It is a certain little filigreed hole in the throne-back which falls conveniently close to the sovereign's ear when he leans back between the periods of the wise, beauteous, and thrilling address to his subjects.