Great prose

I'm reading Eminent Victorians a couple sentences at a time on my iPhone and loving every bit of it. Early on, we're told that if Cardinal Manning (don't worry; I don't know who he is either) had "lived in the Middle Ages he would certainly have been neither a Francis nor an Aquinas, but he might have been an Innocent." And then comes this gem, which I couldn't have composed if my soul depended on it"

As it was, born in the England of the Nineteenth Century, growing up in the very seed-time of modern progress, coming to maturity with the first onrush of Liberalism, and living long enough to witness the victories of Science and Democracy, he yet, by a strange concatenation of circumstances, seemed almost to revive in his own person that long line of diplomatic and administrative clerics which, one would have thought, had come to an end with Cardinal Wolsey.

And no, I don't remember who Wolsey is, either. But what a sentence! Forty-one words before we get to the subject! Forty-nine before the verb!

I would pay money -- American dollars -- to see that sentence diagrammed.