A grand coronation festival of a young queen abruptly opens the story. The state room of the palace is furnished with Oriental magnificence. The representatives of every order, interest and class in the kingdom—constructively the whole community—are present to witness and grace the scene. The fairies who preside over the various departments of nature, and the functions and interests of society, are assembled by special invitation to invoke the blessings and pledge the favors of their several jurisdictions to the opening reign. The ceremony proceeds; the young queen is crowned; the priest pronounces the benediction, and the generous sprites bestow beauty and goodness, and every means of life and luxury, until nothing is left for imagination to conceive or heart to wish. But an unexpected and unwelcome guest arrives—an old Elf, of jealous and malignant character, whose intrusion cannot be prevented, and whose power, unhappily, is so great, that the whole tribe of amicable spirits cannot unbind her spells. Neither can she directly revoke their beneficences; for such is the constitution of fairy-land that the good and evil can neither annihilate each other’s powers nor check each other’s actions, and their active antagonism can have place and play only in issues and effects. The good commanded and dispensed cannot be utterly annulled, the profusion of blessings prepared and pledged cannot be hindered in their source or interrupted in their flow, but the recipients are the debatable ground; they are, within certain limits, subject to the control of the demon, and the _end_ is as well attained by striking them incapable of the intended good. The queen and her household are cast into a magic slumber until (for the Evil will be ultimately destroyed by the Good) an age shall elapse and bring a Deliverer, who, through virtue and courage, shall dissolve the infernal charm. The blight fell upon the paradise in its full bloom, and it remained only for the youngest fairy present, who had withheld her benefactions to the last, to mitigate the doom she could not avert, by bestowing pleasant dreams upon the long and heavy sleepers. A century rolls round. The Knight of the Lion undertakes the enterprise; encounters the horrible troops of monsters and foul fiends which guard the palace; overcomes them; enters the enchanted hall, and wakens the whole company to life, liberty and joy again. The knight is, of course, rewarded with the love he so well deserves and the hand he has so richly earned.