He was the fifth of the eleven children of Thomas Neate, rector and squire of Alvescot, Oxfordshire, and his wife Catherine, born at Adstock, Buckinghamshire, on 18 June 1806.
He was sent to the Collège Bourbon in Paris, where Sainte-Beuve was one of his school-fellows, and he won a prize for French composition for all the schools of France.
[1] Neate matriculated as a commoner of Lincoln College, Oxford, on 2 June 1824, aged 17; he was scholar 1826–8, and graduated as a first-class man in 1828.
He was called to the bar at Lincoln's Inn in 1832, but a quarrel with Sir Richard Bethell terminated his career there.
[1] In 1857 Neate was appointed Drummond professor of political economy at Oxford, for a five-year term.