We have been accustomed to considering the late 17th century as the pinnacle of the run-on sentence – helped, of course, by its pre-dating of most of the formal rules of punctuation – but it appears that this peculiar art-form died very hard.
I highlighted previously the opening of Catherine Cuthbertson’s 1817 novel, Rosabella, bemoaning the mere 108 words she managed to string together and mourning the apparent death of this particular skill.
But perhaps the eulogy was delivered a little prematurely. I have been re-reading Sydney Owenson’s defiantly nationalistic novel, The Wild Irish Girl, from 1806, which unexpectedly challenges the best that the 17th century could produce. This epistolary work ends with a letter from the hero’s father laying out his son’s new duties and the attitude he should adopt towards his tenants, a lecture which concludes with the following exhortation—one running a full 308 words, and built upon a framework of three colons and six semi-colons:
Cherish by kindness into renovating life those national virtues, which though so often blighted in the full luxuriance of their vigorous blow by the fatality of circumstances, have still been ever found vital at the root, which only want the nutritive beam of encouragement, the genial glow of confiding affection, and the refreshing dew of tender commiseration, to restore them to their pristine bloom and vigour: place the standard of support within their sphere; and like the tender vine which has been suffered by neglect to waste its treasures on the sterile earth, you will behold them naturally turning and gratefully twining round the fostering stem, which rescues them from a cheerless and grovelling destiny: and when by justly and adequately rewarding the laborious exertions of that life devoted to your service, the source of their poverty shall be dried up, and the miseries that flowed from it shall be forgotten; when the warm hand of benevolence shall have wiped away the cold dew of despondency from their brow; when reiterated acts of tenderness and humanity shall have thawed the ice which chills the native flow of their ardent feelings; and when the light of instruction shall have dispelled the gloom of ignorance and prejudice from their neglected minds, and their lightened hearts shall again throb with the cheery pulse of national exility;—then, then, and not till then, will you behold the day-star of national virtue rising brightly over the horizon of their happy existence; while the felicity which has awakened to the touch of reason and humanity, shall return back to, and increase the source from which it originally flowed: as the elements, which in gradual progress brighten into flame, terminate in a liquid light, which, reverberating in sympathy to its former kindred, genially warms and gratefully cheers the whole order of universal nature.
A Course Of Steady Reading 