[ad. F. fabuliste, f. L. fābula: see FABLE sb. and -IST.]
1. One who relates fables or legends; a composer of apologues.
1593. Mundy, Def. Contraries, 12. Wherfore thinke ye the fabulists feigned Acteon, to be turned into a Hart as hee was chasing?
1682. Dudley, Light to Paradise, 93. Fortune, who very fitly by the fabulist, is represented with a great Complaint in her mouth upon that occasion.
1757. Foote, The Author, Prologue.
| The Grecian fabulist, in moral lay, | |
| Has thus address’d the writers of this day. |
1835. Johnsoniana, 256. The fabulists frequently make the wolves converse with the lambs.
1874. Farrar, Christ, 45. The fabulists of Christendom, whether heretical or orthodox, surround Christ’s boyhood with a blaze of miracle, make it portentous, terror-striking, unnatural, repulsive.
† b. A professional story-teller. Obs.
1605. B. Jonson, Volpone, II. i. Stale Tabarine, the fabulist.
1698. R. Fergusson, View Eccles., 84. They [Pensions] were not Originally granted in order to promote Quarrels among themse[l]ves, nor to be the Sallaries of Buffoons, Fabulists, or Revilers.
2. One who invents falsehoods.
1625. Bp. Hall, Public Thanksgiving, Wks. 1837. V. 220. Those bold Fabulists … take a course to cast themselves into that pit, whence they have presumptuously feigned the deliverance of others.
1794. Paley, Evid., II. iii. (1817), 87. The following, I think, are passages which were very unlikely to have presented themselves to the mind of a forger or a fabulist.
1836–7. Sir W. Hamilton, Metaph. (1877), I. iii. 47. The former [Heraclides] is confessed to have been an egregious fabulist.
1841. Disraeli, Amen. Lit. (1867), 151. The most ingenuous of voyagers has been condemned as an idle fabulist.
