'I humbly hope to meet again and to part no more'

 I've dropped in on the little church of St Chad's, overlooking Stowe Pool in Lichfield, several times, but had somehow failed to spot these two Johnsonian tablets on the South wall until the other day. The upper one (harder to read in the picture) commemorates Johnson's stepdaughter, Lucy Porter, daughter of his wife 'Tetty' and her first husband, and the lower commemorates Catherine Chambers, 'the faithful servant of Michael Johnson [Samuel's father] and his family'. Catherine Chambers's tablet was erected long after her death, but Lucy Porter's is contemporaneous. It reads: 'In a Vault near this Place are deposited the Remains of LUCY PORTER, who died the 13th of January 1786, aged 70 Years. To whose Memory, in Gratitude for her liberal Acts of Friendship conferred on him, this Monument is erected by the Revd J.B. Pearson.'
  Pearson had reason to be grateful. He and Lucy Porter had become close friends in her later years, and at times he was the only person she would admit to visit her. His visits, and their games of piquet, apparently cheered her, though there were times when he exasperated her. Mrs Thrale/Piozzi relates, on the authority of Johnson himself, how 'being opposed one day in conversation by a clergyman who came often to her house, and feeling somewhat offended, cried out suddenly, 'Why, Mr. Pearson,’ said she, ‘ you are just like Dr. Johnson, I think: I do not mean that you are a man of the greatest capacity in all the world like Dr. Johnson, but that you contradict one every word one speaks, just like him.’
However, their friendship was strong, and Lucy Porter's gratitude real. Pearson, who was Curate of St Chad's, was the principal beneficiary in her will, inheriting a handsome sum of money and many Johnsonian relics – her final 'liberal Acts of Friendship'. 
   Johnson's relations with his stepdaughter were not entirely easy. Though he was, by all reports, 'ever attentive and kind' to Lucy, she was generally indifferent. He told Mrs Thrale that Lucy 'considers me one of the external and accidental things that are taken or left without emotion', though she seems to have warmed somewhat to him later in life. Recently a New Year letter from Johnson to his step-daughter came up for auction. It begins: 'Dearest Madam – I ought to have begun the new year with repairing the omissions of the last'. Johnson wishes Lucy 'long life and happiness always encreasing [sic] till it shall at last end in the happiness of heaven'. He meanwhile is 'pretty much disordered by a cold and cough', has just been 'blooded' [bled], and asks her to give his love to 'Kitty'.
  This 'Kitty' is the same Catherine Chambers memorialised in the lower tablet in St Chad's. She was officially Johnson's mother's maid, but became much more than that, living with her for 35 years, and caring devotedly for her in her last illness. Johnson always held her in very high regard. He is quoted on her memorial tablet (erected in 1910): 'My dear old friend Catherine Chambers; she buried my father and my mother and my brother ... I humbly hope to meet again and to part no more.'