text:  In assenting the Pilgrims constitute him the judge of the tales; and thus mine host with his joyous temper courtesy where courtesy needs worldly sense rough sharp and ready wit and unappealable dictatorship in all matters of the commonwealth becomes a dramatic person of the very first consequence the animating soul of the poetical action; and who continually stepping in between the finishing of one tale and the beginning of the next organically links together the otherwise disunited and incomposite Series