Another challenger of the metre was Mr. Robert Boyle, who endeavoured to show, from a careful and elaborate study of Elizabethan blank verse, that Shakespeare had no share whatever in the composition of the play, and that whoever was the author who collaborated with Fletcher (in Mr. Boyle's opinion it was Massinger) he certainly did not write before 1612, for the metrical peculiarities of the verse are those of the later dramatic style, of which the earliest characteristics did not make themselves felt in the work of any poet till about 1607. It was after reading this paper that Robert Browning, then the president of the New Shakspere Society, wrote his final judgment on the play which was published in the Society's "Transactions." "As you desired I have read once again 'Henry the Eighth'; my opinion about the scanty portion of Shakespeare's authorship in it was formed about fifty years ago, while ignorant of any evidence external to the text itself. I have little doubt now that Mr. Boyle's judgment is right altogether; that the original play, presumably Shakespeare's, was burnt along with the Globe Theatre; that the present work is a substitution for it, probably with certain reminiscences of 'All is true.' In spite of such huff-and-bullying as Charles Knight's for example, I see little that transcends the power of Massinger and Fletcher to execute. It is very well to talk of the tediousness of the Chronicles, which have furnished pretty well whatever is admirable in the characters of Wolsey and Katherine; as wisely should we depreciate the bone which holds the marrow we enjoy on a toast. The versification is nowhere Shakespeare's. But I have said my little say for what it is worth."