From the churchyard of Little St Mary’s Church a good idea of the medieval buildings of Peterhouse may be obtained. Unfortunately, James Essex was allowed to do as he liked with the old court somewhere about 1770, and faced it in the hideous, commonplace style of the time. It is astonishing that he allowed the back of the older building, so out of harmony with the cherished classical unities of his day, to remain in so conspicuous a position. But the obvious history of the buildings begins with Dr Andrew Perne’s library, whose later extension with its gabled end and oriel is such a picturesque object in the perspective of Trumpington Street, and contrasts so oddly with the Corinthian portico of the Fitzwilliam Museum, just beyond. Perne’s work is in that familiar, country-house style which, rather later, we associate in Cambridge with the name of Ralph Symons. The building of 1590 forms the eastern extension of the Hall and Combination Room. It was prolonged in 1632 to stand flush with the present street-pavement. Bishop Matthew Wren made a more notable and more characteristic addition. He built the chapel, which was consecrated in 1632, on a site in the eastern half of the court, just midway between the two wings. At the same time he united his building to the wings by an open cloister supporting a covered gallery. The chapel and cloisters, which divide the court into two unequal halves, have a good deal of picturesqueness, but they are built in a very stilted Italian manner, full of shallow late Gothic detail. The chapel has a considerable reputation founded on its stained glass windows, which are by Professor Aimmüller of Munich. They are astonishing specimens of their art, and reflect the taste of the middle of the century very well. An excellent Flemish east window, contemporary with the building, is usually considered to harmonise very ill with these productions, whose qualities, nevertheless, it considerably enhances. [Illustration: Sᵗ. Peter’s College] Under the Georgian _régime_ Peterhouse suffered a great deal. Sir James Burrough of Caius, then neither Master nor a Knight, had a grand plan for taking down Perne’s library and Wren’s cloisters and putting up buildings of his own. Happily, the funds for this undertaking allowed him to finish only the imposing northern wing, next to Little St Mary’s Church. Like most of his work, this wing, completed in 1742, is in very good taste, and the influence of Gibbs’ building at King’s is to be traced throughout. Nearly half a century later came Essex with a neat taste acquired, perhaps, in the neighbourhood of St Marylebone, and made a beautiful structure exceptionally ugly. Last of all, Mr Francis Gisborne’s trustees, after his death in 1821, built a new western court in the then fashionable sort of Gothic with a part of £20,000 bequeathed to the College in his will. This court calls for little remark.