MEMOIR. 
ENRY WALTER BATES was born at Leicester on 
February 8th, 1825. His family had been long connected 
with the manufacture of hosiery, the staple trade of that town. 
His grandfather, Robert Bates, a dyer of hosiery, was a man of 
great force of character, which, however, took eccentric forms. Of 
his children none rose above mediocrity, except Henry, the father 
of the subject of this memoir. He was born in 1794, and was 
apprenticed to a hosiery manufacturer, in which line of business he 
started on his own account, achieving fair success. He was above 
the average of his class in the possession and cultivation of intel- 
lectual tastes, which, with other influences, led him to an advanced 
stage of Unitarianism as contrasted with the more rigid or Arian 
form of that doctrine prevalent at the time, and still, in some 
degree, extant in rural districts where the old “ Presbyterian causes ” 
survive. His diffidence and modesty caused him to shrink from 
public positions, for which his unswerving integrity fitted him— 
integrity which, as his distinguished son loved to tell, won for him 
the sobrzquet of “Honest Harry Bates” among his fellow-townsmen. 
He died in 1870. His wife, who was the daughter of a wool- 
stapler—a man of considerable mental attainments, and a friend 
of Robert Hall, the celebrated Nonconformist divine—was a woman 
of sweet, loving and unselfish nature, but of feeble constitution. 
She died at the age of fifty-seven, in 1860. 
Of such parentage,—the father an able, upright, modest man, 
robust in constitution ; the mother of gracious nature, but always in 
delicate health,—were Henry Walter Bates and his three younger 
brothers, John, Frederick and Samuel, born. 
After attending various more or less elementary schools in 
Leicester, he was placed at a _boarding-school kept by Mr. 
Creaton, at Billesden, a village some nine miles from Leicester, 
where he remained till midsummer 1838. An old schoolmate 
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