Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White

“At the close of my undergraduate life at Yale I went abroad for nearly three years, and fortunately had, for a time, one of the best of companions, my college mate, Gilman, later president of Johns Hopkins University, and now of the Carnegie Institution, who was then, as he has been ever since, a source of good inspirations to me,— especially in the formation of my ideas regarding education. During the few weeks I then passed in England I saw much which broadened my views in various ways. History was made alive to me by rapid studies of persons and places while traveling, and especially was this the case during a short visit to Oxford, where I received some strong impressions, which will be referred to in another chapter. Dining at Christ Church with Osborne Gordon, an eminent tutor of that period, I was especially interested in his accounts of John Ruskin, who had been his pupil.”