Experts in Old Flemish assure us that his style is most chaste, his language vigorous and clear. He was in truth a poet. When carried away by the beauty or sublimity of his subject, he indulges in a wealth of imagery, comparison, metaphor, astounding at times in boldness and originality. Occasionally even he lapsed into verse; but on the whole his verse is of less beauty and strength than his prose, as he himself seems to have been aware. On the other hand, his prose, after the manner of St. Bernard, St. Bonaventure, the two Victors, and later Thomas à Kempis, frequently gives evidence of deliberate rhythm and rhyme. In a word, far from being illiterate in the strict sense of the word, Blessed John was well acquainted with all the rules and arts of rhetoric; he knew how to employ them; and for all the sublimity of his discourse he did not disdain the use of these aids to interest and persuasion. Finally, it is to be noted that we are expressly informed by contemporaries of Ruysbroeck that he wrote by preference in the vulgar tongue, the more readily and effectively to meet and refute the erroneous doctrines published in the language of the people by the false mystics of his day. XIV Last Days Of the life of our Saint there remains little to be told save the record of the last days and the after glory. He had attained the good old age of eighty-eight, when his mother appeared in a vision to warn him to make ready for the approaching end. It must seem to us there was little need for such warning to one whose whole life had been one long preparation for the coming of the Spouse! He was taken with dysentery, accompanied by fever, and for his greater comfort, and that his lifelong friend van Coudenberg might be at hand to console and assist him, they put him to bed in the Provost's chamber. But the humble Prior besought them to treat him as any of the lowliest brethren and to bear him to the common infirmary. This was accordingly done. There he lay for a fortnight, gradually wasting away with the burning fever, and still more, doubtless, with his burning desires to be dissolved and to be with Christ, for he was constantly heard murmuring such ejaculations as that of the Psalmist, _Sicut desiderat cervus ad fontes aquarum_. He received all the last rites, and the end came in the greatest peace, while his weeping brethren prayed around him, on the Octave day of St. Catherine, V.M., December 2, 1381, in the eighty-eighth year of his age, the sixty-fourth of his priesthood.