 Brown's lectures were immensely popular with students, and on publication they were rapturously received and widely read, running through a great many editions, both in Britain and America, for several decades. Despite this popularity, after 1850 or so, they fell into total neglect. This may have been because Brown's qualified championship of Hume sat rather uncomfortably with the consensus among Scottish philosophers for most of the nineteenth century. Consequently the greatest contribution that his lectures made to philosophical debate was second hand – namely the re-interpretation and defence of Reid that they induced on the part of the most prominent philosopher of the period—Sir William Hamilton.