Hypotaxis.

     No doubt others have made a more systematic and broader studies than I, but, in my own readings, one sentence stands out to me as the longest I have ever encountered, in any language.  Some years ago, I think in Spring of '11, I was reading Melville's The Confidence Man.  It is full of long and humorously winding sentences, but I remember that I brast out laughing when I came upon this one.  I have referred to it often, reading it to friends and family, until  R., my older brother, replied that it that it was not a long sentence at all, but was comprised merely of multiple sentences sewed up into the semblance of a single sentence by punctuation.  A classmate has said something similar, that the semi-colons count as "cheating".  But I insist that it is in fact a very long, authentically periodic sentence, whose meaning is not complete until the very last word (or rather, as you will see, the antepenultimate word).  I break it down below, so that it is apparent that it does indeed have a few "cheating" clauses at the beginning; but, to my mind, the core sentence, much interrupted, is this:

"...[T]hough to be good is much below being righteous, and though there is a difference between the two, ....... it is to be hoped that his goodness will not at least be considered criminal in him.

     If it will be accepted that the first two adversative clauses are not grammatically complete until the very last clause, then all the limbs and outward flourishes––that is, everything between the two "and though" clauses and the clause starting with "it is to be hoped"––, are grammatically part of the sentence, being neither strictly parenthetical nor grammatically independent clauses.  This is, in fact, a very long period, with a few short sentences prefixed as a prelude.  Perhaps I shall one day try to render it into Latin, lest Cicero should go inultus.

Not that he looked as if he were a kind of Wilberforce at all;

that superior merit, probably, was not his;

nothing in his manner bespoke him righteous, but only good,

and though to be good is much below being righteous,

and though there is a difference between the two,

yet not, it is to be hoped, so incompatible as that a righteous man can not be a good man;

though, conversely, in the pulpit it has been with much cogency urged, that a merely good man,

that is, one good merely by his nature,

is so far from there by being righteous, that nothing short of a total change and conversion can make him so;

which is something which no honest mind, well read in the history of righteousness, will care to deny;

nevertheless,

since St. Paul himself, agreeing in a sense with the pulpit distinction,

though not altogether in the pulpit deduction,

and also pretty plainly intimating which of the two qualities in question enjoys his apostolic preference;

I say,

since St. Paul has so meaningly said, that, "scarcely for a righteous man will one die, yet peradventure for a good man some would even dare to die;"

therefore,

when we repeat of this gentleman, that he was only a good man,

whatever else by severe censors may be objected to him,

it is still to be hoped that his goodness will not at least be considered criminal in him.