Walpole credits Bridgeman with having first suggested this innovation, but the new scheme almost certainly originated with Switzer. In gardening theoretical exposition and discussion would, from the nature of the case, antedate the actual construction of gardens according to new principles. Pope was one of the first, if not the first, to put the new ideas into practice. In 1718 he took a long lease of a house and five acres of land at Twickenham, and he at once set about the construction of a garden according to his own ideas. Said Horace Walpole, “It was a little bit of ground of five acres, enclosed with three lanes; and seeing nothing. Pope had twisted and twirled and rhymed and harmonized this, till it appeared two or three sweet little lawns opening and opening beyond one another, and the whole surrounded by thick impenetrable woods.”[543] The plan of the garden drawn by John Searle after Pope’s death shows that in the five acres Pope had a shell temple, a large mount, two small mounts, a bowling green, a vineyard, a quincunx, an obelisk in memory of his mother, and hot-houses and gardeners’ sheds.[544] This garden could hardly be called “natural” but it was an undoubted protest against the formal school and was so regarded, and Pope was counted “the prophet of the new school.” Blomfield and Thomas[545] in reviewing the decay of formal gardening say, “It now became the fashion to rave about Nature, and to condemn the straightforward work of the formal school as so much brutal sacrilege. Pope and Addison led the way with about as much love of Nature as the elegant Abbé Delille some three generations later.” Mason calls Kent, the reputed father of landscape gardening, “Pope’s bold associate.”[546] Walpole dwells on the assistance Kent had from Pope and thinks that the ideas of some of Kent’s best works were really borrowed from Pope’s garden at Twickenham.[547] Hazlitt emphasizes the healthy and important influence in this direction exercised by Pope.[548] In “The Quarterly” for 1816, in a review of Humphrey Repton’s work, we find the influence of Pope commented on as follows: “He so completely developed the principles of true gardening that the theories of succeeding writers have been little more than amplifications of his short general precepts.” Pope’s paper in “The Guardian” was in 1713, and his garden was practically completed by 1718[549] but his most influential utterance on the theory of gardening did not come till 1731, and before that time other significant writings had appeared.[550] One of these was “Huetiana,” a translation in 1722 of the work of Pierre Daniel Huet (1630–1721), bishop of Avranches. In the chapter on “Natural Beauties preferable to Artistic ones” he comments thus on the bad taste of his age: