18 OCTOBER 1969, Page 25

Dream queen

Sir: Neither the last sentence of Lytton Strachey's Queen Victoria (20 September) nor the sentence from Nicholas Nickleby chosen by Thede Palm (Letters, 11 October) can be regarded as the longest in English literature. May I suggest that one may have to award that distinction to the final sentence of The Four Ages of Poetry by Thomas Love Peacock? It is superbly constructed out of 490 words, or at least out of 488 if you prefer to regard the substantive 'all-in-all' as one word. It is worth noting that Strachey himself admired this sentence: see his letter to Virginia Woolf of 9 February 1922. He had possibly been reading the Four Ages in No. 3 of the Percy Reprints, published by Basil Blackwell in 1921.