Burns admired Syme’s education and literary taste; Syme thought the poet ‘a noble fellow’, admired his wit and brilliant conversation, but could not admire his wife. ‘Methinks he has exhibited his poetical genius when he celebrated her’, he said to Cunningham after his first sight of Jean. Before long Burns was submitting his new poems to Syme and expressing implicit confidence in his judgement, though Syme avowed that he scarcely dared to touch a line of them. Sometimes the two would meet in a boisterous crowd at a tavern; again they would spend a quiet evening over a single bottle of wine in the little croft of Ryedale which Syme regarded as his refuge ‘from the frivolous and dissipated society’ of Dumfries. Without Burns, said Syme, his life in the town would be ‘a dreary blank’. Syme had set himself up as a clearing-house for humorous and satirical verses written or collected by his friends, and Burns quickly became the chief contributor to the hoard. Some of the verses compelled caution in sharing them. Of the epigram on the Loyal Natives Club, for instance, Syme told Cunningham that, though he and Burns were ‘far from differing from them on sentiments of loyalty, we differ on sentiment, abstractly considered. They scarcely know the meaning of the word Sentiment, & their Society consists in roaring & drinking.’ ‘Don’t,’ he added after quoting the epigram, ‘let any Dumfries person see this, for one of the Savages, if he heard it, might cut Robin’s pipe.’
Syme’s letters abundantly illustrate what he meant by ‘frivolous and dissipated society’. When the Caledonian Hunt met at Dumfries in November, 1794, ‘Baker, one of the knowing english Squires on the Turf, made an elegant appearance by insulting in the grossest manner Squire Walter Riddel of this place, who pursued him to Durham and made him ask pardon, which is published in our papers of last week.’ On the same occasion the Honourable Ramsay Maule of Panmure showed that for once at least Burns was justified in the tone of a satirical epigram, for Panmure and some drunken companions smeared a helpless underling’s hair with mustard and stuck it full of toothpick quills, ‘by way of hedgehogging him’. That Burns gnashed his teeth and passed by on the other side when he encountered such members of the organization to which he had dedicated his Edinburgh Poems, is no ground for wonder. He had larded the Caledonian Hunt with flattery, and they were behaving like cads and bullies.
But though Burns shrank from the Caledonian Hunt he did not always avoid similar company. There were meetings at which he and Syme drank bumpers out with wild Irishmen—such meetings as led Thomas Telford the engineer jovially to warn Burns that if he went on ‘in his old way, not even a she Devil will be able to meet with a Milt in him.’ There was a drunken brawl with one Captain Dods, who took hot exception to the poet’s toast, ‘May our success in the present war be equal to the justice of our cause.’ That Burns escaped a duel only because he was not the Captain’s social equal did not lessen his humiliation. Most biographers have held that such a toast in the presence of gentlemen holding the King’s commission was a huge breach of the proprieties, and so it was—if Burns was not goaded into giving it. Nothing in the record as it stands forbids belief that Dods, or some other officer who knew that Burns was suspected of sympathy with the French, may have called for a round of loyal toasts with the deliberate intention of embarrassing the poet. In that case, nothing could have been neater than Burns’s evasion, and since nothing came of the episode it is to be presumed that Samuel Clarke succeeded in making the sobered Dods realize what his objection to the sentiment implied.
But there were other similar episodes which cannot be so favourably explained, and which multiply proof that Burns had never acquired finesse, whether in toasting, flattering, or sinning. Whatever he did was done so forthrightly that it attracted attention. And the moment he attracted attention his companions recollected that after all he was a peasant received on sufferance into gentle company. The outcome might be expulsion from the house for conduct which a gentleman born need not even have apologized for, it might be a verbal attack like Captain Dods’s, or it might be merely a tacit resolve to drop him forthwith. The Edinburgh experience repeated itself in Dumfries. Burns’s ill-repute in certain quarters during his life and after his death was not owing to his being a sinner above the other Caledonians, but simply to his lack of the social standing which enabled Kames and Braxfield and Boswell to misbehave without penalty, and which would have tempered the sting of his satirical outbursts.
Occasional public drunken squabbles are not the only evidence that during these last years Burns’s nerves were often exacerbated. The loyal Syme once undertook to rebuke him for some of his wild doings and sayings. His language was too strong—telling the story afterwards he admitted, ‘I may have spoken daggers, but I meant none.’ The poet, his face black with anger, fumbled with his sword-cane. Syme, half laughing, half serious, exclaimed, ‘What! and in my own house, too!’ The conscience-stricken Burns flung away the cane, burst into tears, and positively grovelled in contrition on the flagstone floor. It is not a pleasant scene, and though the vividness with which it stayed in Syme’s memory is indication enough that it was exceptional, it cannot be ignored. No man, drunk or sober, whose nerves were normal could have behaved so.
Fortunately the vividness of Syme’s memory is not the only proof that such conduct was exceptional. Others besides Syme who were nearest to Burns in his last years concur in their loyalty and affection. At the end of 1790 Alexander Findlater reported to his official superior, Supervisor Corbet, that Burns was ‘an active, faithful & zealous officer’, gave ‘the most unremitting attention to the duties of his office (which, by the bye is more than I at first looked for from so eccentric a Genius)’, and might ‘be considered a credit to the profession’. And the judgment which Findlater thus expressed at the beginning of the poet’s Excise career he reaffirmed after his death. Others testified to their regard in deeds as well as words. Though Burns continued to display his life-long preference for the company of extravagant and outré sorts of people the best men in the Excise were the ones who esteemed him most. John Lewars, for example, brother of the Jessie of the songs, was a man of some education, and above the level of the common riding-officer. His father had been Collector at Dumfries, and thus a man of standing in the community. Burns called Lewars ‘a young fellow of uncommon merit—indeed, by far the cleverest fellow I have met with in this part of the world’, and Lewars reciprocated the poet’s affection by service to him and his family during his illness and after his death. And that Burns’s long absence from duty did not bear more heavily on him was due to the kindness of Adam Stobbie, a young expectant who throughout the spring of 1796 performed Burns’s rounds without pay, that the poet might continue to draw his full salary.
Fortunately, too, Syme records bright passages as well as dark in the last years. There were evenings at Ryedale when they consumed more cups of tea than bottles of wine, and when ‘Robin’s confounding wit’ played as sharply as it ever did over a punchbowl. In 1793 and 1794 there were brief excursions with Burns into Kirkcudbright on which the mercurial poet displayed every facet of his nature, bursting into furious rage over a spoiled pair of boots, fulminating brilliantly satirical epigrams against the Earl of Galloway, announcing that he would dine nowhere where he could not ‘eat like a Turk, drink like a fish and swear like the Devil’, and anon proving a decorous and fascinating houseguest at St. Mary’s Isle, seat of the Earl of Selkirk, whose son Lord Daer had given Burns his first glimpse of the peerage. Burns still shrank from the ordeal of encountering such exalted folk—‘I am indeed ill at ease whenever I approach your Honorables & Right Honorables’—though now for a different reason. In 1786 the consciousness of his own rusticity had been uppermost; in 1794 he did not wish to be laid open either to a fresh snub or renewed condescension. But his last recorded intercourse with the peerage was as pleasant—and as dangerous—as his first. The Earl of Selkirk was one of the few Scottish peers who were Whigs at a time when all power belonged to the Tories; thus meeting Burns on congenial grounds he helped to draw him into the last of his ill-advised meddlings with politics by interesting him in the parliamentary campaign of Patrick Heron of Heron. So to the last the peerage influenced Burns against his own best interests. Nevertheless this visit to St. Mary’s Isle is refutation enough of the charge that in his last years Burns had sunk so low that gentlefolk shunned him. The man who so charmed the Earl’s young daughter, Lady Mary Douglas, that she lent him a volume of music and entered into correspondence about his task of fitting Scottish airs with words, can scarcely have been the social outcast some biographers have portrayed. In fact, he strikingly resembles the man who in 1787 swept the Duchess of Gordon off her feet, and won the esteem of Lady Harriet Don and the Dowager Countess of Glencairn.
Despite their intimacy, it would be false to claim that Syme shared all Burns’s interests. No one man could do that. The very topic on which Burns and Lady Mary found common ground was outside Syme’s range. He never could understand what Burns saw in the crude and half-literate James Johnson, because he never understood the bond of fellowship established by mutual devotion to Scottish folk-song. Nevertheless, Syme was probably the closest to Burns of all his Dumfries friends, and knew—as certain impassioned defenders like Anna Dorothea Benson could not—the worst as well as the best in his later conduct. The man who noted that ‘Robin’s temper is not cold and frugal’, and who did not hesitate to record the sword-cane story and certain other episodes, cannot be charged with allowing affection to obscure the full truth about his friend. Hence Syme’s deeds and words at the time of Burns’s death give as reliable a verdict on the poet’s last years as can now be reached.
As Burns’s health failed in 1796 Syme watched him with increasing anxiety. As long as he could he hoped for recovery, but when the poet returned from the Brow Well his ‘cadaverous aspect and shaken frame’ told the truth which the doctors confirmed. On July 17 Syme wrote to warn Cunningham and to urge him to press their friend’s petition to the Commissioners of Excise that they continue his full salary. Two days later, when Syme called at the little house in Mill Street, he saw the hand of Death visibly fixed on Burns:
‘I cannot dwell on the scene. It overpowers me—yet gracious God were it thy will to recover him! He had life enough to acknowledge me, and Mrs. Burns said he had been calling on you and me continually. He made a wonderful exertion when I took him by the hand. With a strong voice he said, “I am much better today—I shall soon be well again, for I command my spirits & my mind. But yesterday I resigned myself to death.” Alas it will not do.’