In Mr. Payne Collier's Notes and Emendations, p. 407., we are informed that the old corrector substitutes blankness for blanket. The change is to me so exceedingly bad, even if made on some sort of authority (as an extinct 4to.), that I should have let it be its own executioner, had not Mr. Collier apparently given in his adhesion to it. I now beg to offer a few obvious reasons why blanket is unquestionably Shakspeare's word.
In the Rape of Lucrece, Stanza cxv., we have a passage very nearly parallel with that in Macbeth:
"O night, thou furnace of foul reeking smoke,
Let not the jealous day behold thy face,
Which underneath thy black all-hiding cloak,
Immodestly lies martyr'd with disgrace."
In Lucrece, the cloak of night is invoked to screen a deed of adultery; in Macbeth the blanket of night is invoked to hide a murder: but the foul, reeking, smoky cloak of night, in the passage just quoted, is clearly parallel with the smoky blanket of night in Macbeth. The complete imagery of both passages has been happily caught by Carlyle (Sartor Resartus, 1841, p. 23.), who, in describing night, makes Teufelsdröckh say:
"Oh, under that hideous coverlet of vapours, and putrefactions, and unimaginable gases, what a fermenting-vat lies simmering and hid!"
C. Mansfield Ingleby.
Birmingham.