Francis, Convers

Francis, Convers D.D., a Unitarian minister, was born at West Cambridge, Massachusetts, November 9, 1795, and was educated at Harvard, where he passed A.B. in 1815. After completing his theological course at the divinity school in Cambridge, he became (1819) pastor of the Unitarian church in Watertown, Mass., where he remained until 1842, when he was made Parkman professor of pulpit eloquence and pastoral care at Cambridge. He filled this post acceptably until his death, April 7, 1863. He published The Life of John Eliot, Apostle to the Indians (1836), in Sparks's Collection of American Biography; several memoirs in the Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, and a number of occasional discourses. He was also a frequent contributor to periodicals. — Appleton, Annual Cyclopaedia, 1863, page 202.