Thomas survived his brother by nearly forty years. His cloister life moved on through three decades with the external monotony of an existence subjected to rule. Five years of the forty were years of pestilence and popular distress, which he duly chronicles. But the only real interruption of his routine which still has a living interest was his acquaintance with young Johan Wessel, who came to pursue his studies in Zwolle, being drawn by the charm of the _Imitation_ into the neighborhood of its author. This probably was about 1460, when he sought and made Thomas’s acquaintance, and often conversed with him upon the greatest of themes. But the earliest biography of Wessel belongs to the next century, and is by a Protestant pastor in Bremen; so the statements that Wessel found Thomas and his brother monks all too superstitious, and rebuked the Mariolatry of the author of the _Imitation_, are open to doubt. That Wessel, the forerunner of Luther, influenced Thomas in the writing of the _Imitation_ is a palpable absurdity. For a short time he was procurator or steward of the monastery, a task which must have been uncongenial to him, but which he would discharge with his best diligence, as his first biographer, Jodocus Badius Ascensius, says he did. Then he was sub-prior a second time in 1448. The chronicle of Mount St. Agnes ends with January 17th, 1471; its author died July 26th of the same year. His health had been singularly good, but toward the close of his life he suffered from dropsy. His eyesight never failed him, and he retained all his faculties in full vigor to the last. As the end drew near, the sense of all he had been to his brethren as a friend and counsellor deepened in them at the prospect of losing him. All that their love could do and his ascetic principles would permit, they did to lighten the burdens and relieve the pains of his illness. He died in his ninety-second year, after having been sixty-three years in the order and fifty-eight in the priesthood.