[Richard Togher]

Thank you Mr Pedantic for the passage from 'Brideshead Revisited'

To me, Waugh's passage seems more obviously 'periodic' (with use of such words as 'aghast' and 'slatternly') than the Gibbon passage you supplied.

Would you consider such phrases as 'circumscribed to the decay of the city' and 'several avocations intervened' archaic.

I was also wondering if the use of such language in the 20th century was peculiar to Waugh, or do you know of other novelists from his period - or even later - who wrote like this