Oldest profession (phrase) called “the oldest profession in the world", a profession which is carried on in Piccadilly, Regent street, and other parts of London with great energy every night … In the same year the "Pall Mall Gazette" reported a speech in which "Mrs. Ormiston Chant … implored us to stand shoulder to shoulder and destroy what Kipling has called 'the oldest profession in the world'". The phrase was frequently used as a euphemism when delicacy forbade direct reference to prostitution. Kipling was not the first to employ the phrase "the most ancient profession" in an opprobrious sense. The Irish poet Henry
The Bard (poem) influenced was the Scot James Macpherson, whose prose poems issued under the name of the ancient bard Ossian achieved extraordinary popularity, spreading the Celtic glamour across Europe and America. Also indirectly inspired by "The Bard" were Walter Scott's hugely popular evocations of the Scottish past. "The Bard", in fact, was a precursor of Romanticism, or as the critic William Powell Jones put it, Gray "started a flame…when he wrote "The Bard", and the fire swept into the Romantic movement itself." Its influence extended to Ernest Renan, Matthew Arnold, and as far as W. B. Yeats and the other Anglo-Irish writers