[f. as prec. + -NESS.] The quality or state of being fabulous. a. Of a person: Fondness for fables; proneness to fiction or invention. b. Of a narrative, etc.: Resemblance to a fable; fabulous, fictitious or mythical character.
a. 1611. Cotgr., Fabulosité, fabulousnesse, th’ inuention of lyes, tales, fables, or fained reports.
1680. Dodwell, Two Lett. Advice (1691), 169. And for this you are not onely to trust the Rabbins, both for their notorious fabulousness, and their little Antiquity, and their plain imitations of the Graecian Philosophers even before our Saviour’s time, upon occasion of their acquaintance with them by the Macedonian conquests, whom yet together with Philo and Josephus.
1711. Brit. Apollo, III. 2/1. The Fabulousness of the Poets.
1775. Johnson, W. Isl. Scot., Wks. X. 329. His [Boethius’s] fabulousness, if he was the author of the fictions, is a fault for which no apology can be made.
b. 1587. Golding, De Mornay, xxx. 488. The fondness and fabulousness thereof appeereth in this.
1662. Stillingfl., Orig. Sacr., I. vi. heading. The fabulousness of the Heroical age of Greece.
1702. Echard, Eccl. Hist., III. iv. 386. He afterwards wrote two letters … to shew the Fabulousness, or at least the Uncertainty of the History of Susanna.
1807. G. Chalmers, Caledonia, I. Preface, p. v. Rectifying the ancient history of North-Britain, whatever might be its fabulousness, or obscurity, or its difficulties, arising from disputes.
1837. Arnold, in Stanley, Life & Corr. (1844), II. viii. 89. If I thought that they contained really an historical skeleton, disguised under fabulous additions, it would of course be easy to give the historical outline as history in my own natural language, and to omit, or to notice with a grave remark as to their fabulousness, the peculiar marvels of the stories.
