Handsome Nell was the first song written by Robert Burns,[2] often treated as a poem, that was first published in the last volume of James Johnson's Scots Musical Museum in 1803 (No.551) with an untitled tune.

Burns recorded in holograph on page three of his first Commonplace Book that he wrote the song or Rhyme at the age of only fifteen whilst living at Mount Oliphant Farm,[3] it is regarded as his earliest production, inspired by a farm servant aged fourteen, named either Nelly Kilpatrick or Nelly Blair.

[1] In the song, by 1783 set to the tune I am a man unmarried,[2] beauty is relegated to secondary importance and female virtue, grace, innocence and modesty are made out to be more desirable than looks alone.

Indeed, I did not not well know myself I liked so much to loiter behind with her when returning in the evening from our labours; why the tones of her voice made my heart-strings thrill like an Aeolian harp, and particularly why my pulse beat such a furious rantann when I looked and fingered over her hand to pick out the nettle-stings and thistles.

"[9] "The following composition," says Burns, in his Commonplace Book, "..was the first of my performances, and done at an early period of my life, when my heart glowed with honest warm simplicity, unacquainted and uncorrupted with the ways of a wicked world.

Burns had written "Handsome Nell" whilst the family lived at Mount Oliphant Farm, near Alloway in the autumn of 1774.

Burns wrote that ..I am well pleased with; and I think it conveys a fine idea of that amiable part of the sex --- the agreables; or what in our Scotch dialect we call a sweet sonsy lass.

Burns wrote that The thoughts in the fifth stanza come finely up to my favourite idea of a sweet sonsy lass; the last line halts a little.

Burns wrote that it has several minute faults; but I remember I composed it in a wild enthusiasm of passion, and to this hour I never recollect it, but my heart melts, and my blood sallies at the rememberance.·