Old-fashioned as heck.
Annotation: Great sentence. Can't but be authentic. The problem's the parse. It can be made to work; and it's not too strange on a transformational view: the idea is that the first and last words of an English sentence, clause, or phrase enjoy pride of place; so they tend to attract semantic centers. ("It's an idiom" means "I can't parse it.")
Usage of "Not but that" (to avoid the confounding "not, but that") peaked in the 17th and 18th centuries, but was not zero in 2000, and was up in 2008! Compare the possibly contemporary "Not but that particular exceptions may have place" (Milton, Tetrachordon, 1645).
I should gloss "not but that I pity" as "although I must pity."
By my lights it's the efficient encoding of the combination of contrast and necessity that makes "not but" attractive and keeps it alive.
I adopted this by mistake while trying to learn how to use the software so I have edited it as I can't work out how to unadopt it!
I've put it back to the original. I agree with halfb1t. "Great sentence." It's the sort of language you might find in a novel by Sir Walter Scott.
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