Of gorgeous scenery and gay dresses Garrick was as fond as any manager of our own day; he knew that these were never-failing allurements to the general public. Yet as a rule he confined his spectacle to the after-pieces; did not, after the modern fashion, illustrate and decorate what he regarded as the legitimate entertainments of the theatre. For new as for old plays, the stock scenery of the house generally sufficed, and some of the scenes employed were endowed with a remarkable longevity. Tate Wilkinson, writing in 1790, mentions a scene as then in use which he remembered so far back as the year 1747. 'It has wings and flat of Spanish figures at full length, and two folding doors in the middle. I never see those wings slide on but I feel as if seeing my old acquaintance unexpectedly.' Of the particular plays assisted by De Loutherbourg's brush, small account has come down to us. They were, no doubt, chiefly of a pantomimic and ephemeral kind. For the 'Christmas Tale,' produced at Drury Lane in 1773--the composition of which has been generally assigned to Garrick, though probably due to Charles Dibdin--De Loutherbourg certainly painted scenes, and the play enjoyed a considerable run, thanks rather to his merits than the author's. Some years later, in 1785, for the scenery of O'Keeffe's _Omai_, produced at Covent Garden Theatre, the painter furnished the designs, for which he was paid by the manager one thousand pounds, says Mr. J.T. Smith; one hundred pounds, says Mr. O'Keeffe; so stories differ! The scenery of _Omai_ was appropriate to the then newly discovered islands in the South Pacific, and the play concluded with a kind of apotheosis of Captain Cook. In the course of _Omai_, Wewitzer, the actor who played a chief warrior of the Sandwich Islands, delivered a grand harangue in _gibberish_, which of course, for all the audience knew to the contrary, was the proper language of the natives; a sham English translation of the speech being printed with the book of the songs. The harangue was received with enormous applause!