John Ryland reckoned that Francis and the silver tongued Samuel Pearce, for whom Francis wrote an elegy on his early death, were the best preachers he knew. He once wrote, beginning with Pearce, that
Much as that seraphic young man was esteemed by many, I know not that anyone thought more highly of him than myself. I was used to think that Benjamin Francis, as an aged man, and Samuel Pearce, as a young man, were the two most popular preachers I had personally known, who, without rising to sublime eloquence, owed no part of their popularity to eccentricity. A peculiar fluency of delivery, and a most serious and affectionate address, would have made them acceptable to all classes of hearers, in any part of the kingdom.
