[T]he many still would cling / To toil and tears—to life and suffering; / And some, whose anguish might not brook to wait / That shunless doom, plunged headlong to their fate: […]

However, it now seems that the investigators do not believe that the deliberate laming of horses is involved in the case. Injuring or mis-shoeing a horse so subtly that it walks sound in the paddock but is lame in a race is very hard to achieve.

the military-aristocratic Ch'oe family, which passed its shogunal type authority down hereditarily through four generations.

[…] part of the cross-guard. Often these chappes - a word, incidentally, that means “capes” - were decorated in needlework with the arms or device of the owner.