The architect of the College buildings was Ralph Simons, who had built Emmanuel and "thoroughly reformed a great part of Trinity College." It is interesting to note that more than half of the sum received from Lady Sidney's estate to found and endow the College was expended in the erection of the hall, the Master's lodge, and the hall court. These buildings formed the whole of the College when it was opened in 1598. How picturesque it must have been in those days, before the red brick of which it is built was covered with plaster, one can see by Loggan's print of the College, made about 1688. The buildings are simple enough, but quite well designed. The "rose-red" of the brick, at least, seems to have struck the poet, Giles Fletcher, when he wrote of Sidney in 1633 in his Latin poem on the Cambridge colleges:-- "Haec inter media aspicies mox surgere tecta Culminibus niveis roseisque nitentia muris; Nobilis haec doctis sacrabit femina musis, Conjugio felix, magno felicior ortu, Insita Sussexo proles Sidneia trunco." [Illustration: The Garden Front Sidney Sussex College] The arrangement of the hall, kitchen, buttery, and Master's lodge was much the same as at present. The hall had an open timber roof, with a fine oriel window at the dais end, but no music gallery. Fuller says that the College "continued without a chapel some years after the first founding thereof, until at last some good men's charity supplied this defect." In 1602, however, the old hall of the friars--Fuller calls it the dormitory, but there is little doubt that it was in reality the refectory--was fitted up as a chapel, and a second storey added to form a library. A few years later, about 1628, a range of buildings forming the south side of the chapel court was built. In 1747, the buildings having become ruinous, extensive repairs were carried out, and the hall was fitted up in the Italian manner. The picturesque gateway which had stood in the centre of the street wall of the hall court was removed, and a new one of more severe character was built in its place. This also at a later time was removed and re-erected as a garden entrance from Jesus Lane. Between 1777 and 1780 the old chapel was destroyed, and replaced by a new building designed by Essex, in a style in which, to say the least, there is certainly nothing to remind the modern student of the old hall of the Grey Friars' Monastery, where for three centuries of stirring national life the Franciscan monks had kept alive, let us hope, something of the mystic tenderness, the brotherly compassion, the fervour of missionary zeal, which they had learnt from their great founder, Saint Francis of Assisi. Of the old Fellows' garden, which in 1890 was partly sacrificed to provide a site for the new range of buildings and cloister--perhaps the most beautiful of modern collegiate buildings at either university--designed by Pearson, Dyer writes with enthusiasm:--