While he remained in that coll. [University College, Oxford] which was five years . . . . he made an excursion for about 9 months to the famous mathematician Will. Oughtred parson of Aldbury in Surrey, by whom he was initiated in the study of mathematics, and afterwards retiring to his coll. for a time, he at length went to London, was entered a student in the Middle Temple.[58] Extracts from letters of W. Gascoigne to Oughtred, of the years 1640 and 1641, throw some light upon mathematical teaching of the time: Amongst the mathematical rarities these times have afforded, there are none of that small number I (a late intruder into these studies) have yet viewed, which so fully demonstrates their authors’ great abilities as your Clavis, not richer in augmentations, than valuable for contraction; . . . . Your belief that there is in all inventions aliquid divinum, an infusion beyond human cogitations, I am confident will appear notably strengthened, if you please to afford this truth belief, that I entered upon these studies accidentally after I betook myself to the country, having never had so much aid as to be taught addition, nor the discourse of an artist (having left both Oxford and London before I knew what any proposition in geometry meant) to inform me what were the best authors.[59] The following extracts from two letters by W. Robinson, written before the appearance of the 1647 English edition of the Clavis, express the feeling of many readers of the Clavis on its extreme conciseness and brevity of explanation: I shall long exceedingly till I see your Clavis turned into a pick-lock; and I beseech you enlarge it, and explain it what you can, for we shall not need to fear either tautology or superfluity; you are naturally concise, and your clear judgment makes you both methodical and pithy; and your analytical way is indeed the only way. . . . . I will once again earnestly entreat you, that you be rather diffuse in the setting forth of your English mathematical Clavis, than concise, considering that the wisest of men noted of old, and said stultorum infinitus est numerus, these arts cannot be made too easy, they are so abstruse of themselves, and men either so lazy or dull, that their fastidious wits take a loathing at the very entrance of these studies, unless it be sweetened on with plainness and facility. Brevity may well argue a learned author, that without any excess or redundance, either of matter or words, can give the very substance and essence of the thing treated of; but it seldom makes a learned scholar; and if one be capable, twenty are not; and if the master sum up in brief the pith of his own long labours and travails, it is not easy to imagine that scholars can with less labour than it cost their masters dive into the depths thereof.[60] Here is the judgment of another of Oughtred’s friends: