“ Pérez Galdós became a member of the Spanish Academy, and was also elected to the Cortes; but it is solely as a romancer that his name is familiar wherever Spanish is spoken, as a national novelist of fertile talent, and a most happy humorist who in his eccentricities and oddities is hardly inferior to Dickens. ”

“ Old charters, old letters, old newspapers were collected by him with the minuteness of a German archivist; no novelist was ever more thoroughly equipped as regards the details of his period. Trafalgar, the first volume of the Episodios nacionales, appeared in 1879; the remaining books of this first series are entitled La Cort de Carlos IV., El 19 de marzo y el 2 de mayo, Bailén, Napoleón en Chamartin, Zaragoza, Gerona, Cadiz, Juan Martin el Empecinado and La Batalla de Arpiles. ”