A RELATIVELY happy course through life could have been predicted for Lord Frederick (Figure i) at birth. Among the advantages bestowed upon him then were intelligence, good looks, longevity (his own life span of eighty-seven years was to surpass that of his father, who lived to be seventy-seven, and of his brother who died at the age of eighty-three in I 8o6, ten years before himself), and an assured position, as the youngest son of a Scottish duke-to-be, in the social hierarchy of the time. Born in 1729, the fourth son of the heir to the dukedom of Argyll, he was educated at Westminster School and at Christ Church, Oxford, receiving permission to practice law in 1753. He chose to enter politics as a Scottish Member of Parliament, and represented Glasgow and Argyllshire from 1761 until I799.1 It was therefore possibly in London, early in his political career, that he met a fellow countryman, Robert Adam, who had settled there in I 758. A strong fellow feeling existed at that time among the Scots who lived in London. Numbers of them were in the habit of foregathering at the British Coffee House in Cockspur Street, a building designed by Robert Adam, to discuss affairs of the nation, their nation. However Lord Frederick and Robert Adam happened to meet, it is certain that they were acquainted by 1767, the date written on the sketch for a bookcase, one of the large collection of Adam drawings in i. Paul, Scots Peerage, I, p. 384. Sir John Soane's Museum, London.2 architect inscribed this sketch across the top: Design of a Bookcase for Right Honourable Lord Frederick Campbell (Figure 2). piece of furniture that was executed from this design is now at the Metropolitan Museum (Figure 3). It is of pine, stained to resemble mahogany, with parts of the carved detail highlighted by gilding. two doors below open on two cupboards, while the upper section consists of two compartments each enclosed behind a glass-fronted door. insertion of panes of glass into these doors constitutes the most glaring departure from Adam's design, where the spaces between the upper door frames are occupied by a kind of trelliswork picked out in yellow wash on a light blue ground. Obviously Adam never intended that glass should be used in the doors: the books were to be protected by a metal grid, presumably of polished brass, behind which would hang a blue silk curtain, intended as a sort of dust sheet for the books (the practice of stretching silk artfully across shelves of books persisted well into the following century-as the cabinetmaker George Smith observes of a bookcase design published in I828:3 The central part with the wings, is represented as having the doors filled with silk ... for nothing can distress the eye more than the