the Victorian inkhorns decided

A lot of these rules have been blamed on Robert Lowth, an 18th century English bishop, but I've been reading his Short Introduction to English Grammar, and have yet to find anything of the sort. In fact, I think it more likely that lesser known Victorians did the damage, as they did so much other damage ...

The thing about the Romans is that given a preposition and the noun phrase that it governed, they enjoyed splitting the preposition and interposing other words. Of course, it's easier in Latin with cases and all to show some of the relationships between words in a sentence rather than just word order.