SYMBMATMAKE by Richard Hindmarsh was the inspiration for this submission. I have rewritten to vectorize it. No more loops! It also illustrates how to write compact code without loops.

Short Description:
Returns symbolic matrices with subscripts which can be manipulated using the Symbolic Toolbox.

e.g. symbmat('a',2,3)

returns
[ a11, a12, a13]
[ a21, a22, a23]

e.g. symbmat('a',1,2)

returns
[ a1, a2]