Meditations1634 · public domain
The first English Meditations, and it reads like it: rich, rolling seventeenth-century prose full of words like “shamefastness” and “manlike behaviour.” Meric Casaubon (1634) is a historical curiosity more than a daily reader, and his section numbering wanders from the modern standard, but there is a gravity to the old diction that suits an emperor musing on death. Free and public domain. Come for the flavour of Jacobean English, not for a transparent modern text.