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.’ Syme was already consulting with Patrick Miller, John M’Murdo, Dr. Maxwell, and other Dumfries friends to set measures afoot for the welfare of Jean and the children; when he wrote again on the 21st, shaken by the ‘variety of distressful emotions’ stirred by Burns’s death, he gave further details of their plans, and urged Cunningham to launch a similar plan in Edinburgh and to see that a proper obituary was prepared. Here Cunningham blundered. He entrusted the obituary to George Thomson, and the latter’s remark that Burns’s ‘extraordinary endowments were accompanied with frailties which rendered them useless to himself and his family’ roused the Dumfries friends to indignation. ‘We were much hurt at this,’ said Syme, ‘& reckoned it indelicate, if not unfeelingly superfluous on that occasion.’