He was son of Dr. John Francis, rector of St. Mary's, Dublin (from which living he was for a time ejected for political reasons), and dean of Lismore, and was born in 1708.
He held for some time the curacy of St. Peter's parish, Dublin, and while resident in that city published his translation of Horace, besides writing in the interests of ‘the Castle.’ Soon after the death of his wife, Elizabeth Rowe, whom he married in 1739, he crossed to England, and in 1744 obtained the rectory of Skeyton in Norfolk.
In 1764 he attacked Pitt and John Wilkes with great bitterness in the ‘Political Theatre.’ On 22 June 1761 he was inducted to the vicarage of Chilham in Kent, but resigned in the summer of 1762, and through Lord Holland's influence he held from May 1764 to 1768 the chaplaincy at Chelsea Hospital, and the rectory of Barrow, Suffolk, to which he was instituted on 26 February 1762, and which he retained until his death.
I'll take his five out of six against them all.’ The first part, consisting of the ‘Odes, Epodes, and Carmen Seculare of Horace in Latin and English,’ in which he was assisted by William Dunkin, was issued at Dublin in two volumes in 1742.
It was republished in London in the next year, and in 1746 two more volumes, containing the ‘Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry,’ appeared with a dedication in prose to Robert Jocelyn, lord chancellor of Ireland.
Genest styles it ‘a cold and uninteresting play, the plot avowedly taken in part from a French piece.’ Both pieces were printed, the former being dedicated to the Countess of Lincoln, and the latter to Lord Chesterfield.
An anonymous volume by John Taylor was printed in 1813 with the title of A Discovery of the Author of the “Letters of Junius,” founded on Evidence and Illustrations.