the first manuscript appeared, it was touted as a major discovery. But when the second manuscript appeared, it was pronounced a forgery by Josef Dobrovský. Jernej Kopitar seconded this opinion, accusing Hanka of being the author of the hoax. Many of the important Czech writers at the time, however, supported the manuscripts' authenticity including dictionary compiler and author of a Czech literary history Josef Jungmann, writer František Čelakovský, historian František Palacký, and poet-folklorist Karel Jaromír Erben. In England, John Bowring, who was a translator of Slavonic poetry, had dealings with authorities on both sides of the debate. When he first sought suitable Czech material, he approached Kopitar, who recommended Dobrovský as someone who could provide an appropriate list of texts. Later, Čelakovský learned of this enterprise, and not only furnished his own list, but became Bowring's close collaborator, sending him material with his own German paraphrases for Bowring to work on. Bowring, partly to make amends for the delayed publication of the Czech poetry anthology, wrote a piece in the Foreign Quarterly Review in 1828, which presented the debate about these manuscripts evenly for both sides. Wratislaw noted in his 1852 translation that he was well aware of the controversy when he published his translation, but determined that the skeptics had not made their case. Alois Vojtěch Šembera wrote a book in 1879 which contended that the "" poem (the second manuscript) was a forgery and named as its creator. The authenticity of both manuscripts was not rejected conclusively until the 1880s when several independently-written articles appeared that assaulted their veracity. One author who doubted the authenticity of the manuscripts, Tomáš Masaryk, used his journal Athenaeum to publish a body of literature to support that view. The linguist Jan Gebauer wrote an article debunking the manuscripts in the February 1886 issue of Athenaeum, and Masaryk in a later issue wrote that the poems could be proven as "reworked from Modern Czech to Old Czech", presenting metrical and grammatical evidence to support his claim. In the interim, the manuscripts were generally regarded romantically as evidence of early Czech literary achievement, demonstrating that such epic and lyric poetry predated even the Nibelungenlied. They were also interpreted as evidence that early Czech society had embraced democratic principles. Pan-Slavic nationalists saw in the manuscripts a symbol of national conscience. Therefore, when Palacký wrote his Czech history based partly on these manuscripts, he depicted a