London: Published by Wightman and Cramp, 24 Paternoster Row, 1826.[63] The book contains an introduction in verse by Allan Cunningham, whose acquaintance Borrow seems to have made in London.

It commences: Sing, sing, my friend, breathe life again Through Norway's song and Denmark's strain: On flowing Thames and Forth, in flood, Pour Haco's war-song, fierce and rude.
Cunningham had not himself climbed very far up the literary ladder in 1825, although he was forty-one years of age.

At one time a stonemason in a Scots village, he had entered Chantrey's studio, and was 'superintendent of the works' to that eminent sculptor at the time when Borrow called upon him in London, and made an acquaintance which never seems to have extended beyond this courtesy to the younger man's _Danish Ballads_.

The point of sympathy of course was that in the year 1825 Cunningham had published _The Songs of Scotland, Ancient and Modern_.
But Allan Cunningham, whose _Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters_ is his best remembered book to-day, scarcely comes into this story.
There are four letters from Cunningham to Borrow in Dr.Knapp's _Life_, and two from Borrow to Cunningham.

The latter gave his young friend much good advice.