Life

He was born in Roxburghshire

Roxburghshire

Roxburghshire or the County of Roxburgh is a registration county of Scotland. It borders Dumfries to the west, Selkirk to the north-west, and Berwick to the north. To the south-east it borders Cumbria and Northumberland in England.It was named after the Royal Burgh of Roxburgh...

 around the end of the seventeenth century, and came to London as a journeyman printer. Samuel Johnson

Samuel Johnson

Samuel Johnson , often referred to as Dr. Johnson, was an English author who made lasting contributions to English literature as a poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer...

 approved of him as a Jacobite

Jacobitism

Jacobitism was the political movement in Britain dedicated to the restoration of the Stuart kings to the thrones of England, Scotland, later the Kingdom of Great Britain, and the Kingdom of Ireland...

, and gave him a place on the team of six helpers he used on his Dictionary

A Dictionary of the English Language

Published on 15 April 1755 and written by Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, sometimes published as Johnson's Dictionary, is among the most influential dictionaries in the history of the English language....

.

Shiels died of consumption in May's Buildings, London, on 27 December 1753.

Works

Shiels was recommended to Ralph Griffiths

Ralph Griffiths

Ralph Griffiths was a journal editor and publisher of Welsh extraction...

 and employed on the Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland to the time of Dean Swift (London, 5 vols. 1753), to which the name of Theophilus Cibber

Theophilus Cibber

Theophilus Cibber was an English actor, playwright, author, and son of the actor-manager Colley Cibber.He began acting at an early age, and followed his father into theatrical management. In 1727, Alexander Pope satirized Theophilus Cibber in his Dunciad as a youth who "thrusts his person full...

 was attached. The compilation was mainly based on work of Gerard Langbaine

Gerard Langbaine

Gerard Langbaine was an English dramatic biographer and critic, best known for his An Account of the English Dramatic Poets , the earliest work to give biographical and critical information on the playwrights of English Renaissance theatre...

 and Giles Jacob

Giles Jacob

Giles Jacob was a British legal writer and literary critic who figures as one of the dunces in Alexander Pope's 1728 Dunciad:Pope's lines single Jacob out for satire primarily for his dogmatism and pettiness...

, with the help of Thomas Coxeter

Thomas Coxeter

-Life:Born at Lechlade in Gloucestershire on 20 September 1689, he was educated at Coxwell, Berkshire, and at Magdalen School in Oxford. On 7 July 1705 he was entered a commoner of Trinity College, Oxford...

's. Any fresh research used was due to Shiels, with Cibber's role being revision. The later volumes are ascribed on the title-page to Cibber ‘and other hands.’

Apart from his compilations, Shiels wrote a didactic poem on ‘Marriage’ in blank verse (London, ‘at the Dunciad in Ludgate Street,’ 1748), and another piece in praise of Johnson's ‘Irene,’ called ‘The Power of Beauty’ (printed in George Pearch's ‘Collection,’ i. 186). Shiels venerated his countryman James Thomson, on whose death he published an elegy, ‘Musidorus’ (London, 1748).