_Passage in Macbeth, Act I. Sc. 5._--
" . . . Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor heaven peep through the _blanket_ of the dark,
To cry, Hold, hold!"
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 Teufelsdroeckh say:
"Oh, under that _hideous coverlet of vapours, and putrefactions, and
unimaginable gases_, what a fermenting-vat lies simmering and hid!"