The wise fool, the sensible madman, and the village idiot, traditional characters in European literature, are best-known through Don Quixote. Benito Perez Galdos (1843-1920), Spain's most important novelist after Cervantes, contributed to this corpus with a number of principal characters whose affinity to Cervantes's hero is clearly recognizable. In The Wisdom of Eccentric Old Men Peter Bly demonstrates that a number of Galdos's secondary characters - the eccentric old men who appear with regular frequency in the realist social novels of his most important period of writing, 1876 to 1897 -...