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.